Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a neat thing. The idea behind it is to bridge the gap between where automation is and where people would like for it to be. People get paid to do what computers can’t yet do, and requesters get useful work done. But as with all good things, it’s not perfect.
I’ve seen the horror stories. Well, not horror stories. Bad experiences, at least. People go in, spend an hour, make a few dollars, and get scammed on half the jobs they did.
People do it wrong because Amazon has allowed a miserable experience for new users to form. I fault the scammers more than Amazon, but Amazon shares some of the blame for not being more proactive in educating new users.
But it’s all good. Would you guess I’ve been making about $6/hour on Mechanical Turk? Granted, I haven’t tried much. I’ve only submitted about 30 jobs at an average of 50 cents per job. All of them are with highly reviewed requesters.
Did I say reviews? You’re probably wondering what I’m jabbering on about. You see, Amazon didn’t provide a review thing for Mechanical Turk. This means anyone who hasn’t found Turkopticon is flying blind.
And that thing they call search is just miserable. Use the Mechanical Turk subreddit to find new jobs, and check out the forums and other subreddits linked on the sidebar.
A lot of the better jobs need 100+ approved jobs (called hits), but this is easy to reach if you’re using these tools and resources to find jobs. Only half of my 30 jobs have been accepted in the 2 days I’ve been at this, but I have a high degree of confidence that I’ll be paid for my good work because all the requesters have tens to hundreds of good reviews.
I’ve set a target for $5 a day. That’s five $1 jobs (called HITs), ten 50 cent jobs, or some assortment of values. I don’t usually bother with jobs worth less than 50 cents. I was lucky to find these sites early on, so my ratings are high. That means I get all the good, high-paying jobs that have high requirements.
A lot of the jobs seem sketchy, like most of the search and advertising-related tasks. Fortunately for us, universities and businesses love Mechanical Turk for research. You’ll find a lot of interesting surveys that pay well and aren’t hard to do. The only catch is that it takes ten days after your work is accepted by the requester before you see the money in your Amazon Payments account.
Do you have experience with Mechanical Turk? Share it in the comments below.
Good article, Michael, especially the info about TurkOpticon and the subReddit. TO especially is essential for new Turkers to begin using right away. You’re also right that getting to 100 HITs is useful for gaining eligibility for a broader range of HITs, although the 1000-HIT mark is even more significant in that sense, as are the 5000-HIT and 10,000-HIT milestones.
Casual and serious Turkers can also benefit from the very active daily threads on forums such as mturkforum.com (I’ve no financial interest there but am a forum member myself), where HITs are discussed right as they come up and the moment’s best bets can be found. Their minimum standards for posting tend to be 10 cents of earnings per minute worked, which works out to the $6/hour you mention.
Personally, I have found transcription and writing to be the best-paying and most reliable work on MTurk. There are some particularly reputable requesters within each. I always average at least a double-digit wage hourly by focusing on those two specialties (yes, I mean no less than $10/hour), while Turking only a few hours each day, without fear of rejections or scamming.
Getting to the highest pay rates in either specialty can be a bit tricky, though, so it pays to do your homework. In the case of transcription, things are complex enough that I wrote a whole Kindle book to help others figure it out. But getting to the top of the pay chain in either specialty can be done relatively quickly; I did it in about a month, working very part-time at it, and I believe that is well achievable for others, too.
Finally, I want to mention an inaccuracy in what you’ve said about it taking 10 days for Turk earnings to reach your US bank account. You may be thinking of one’s very first 10 active days on Turk, when Amazon Payments will disburse no money at all. However, after that, you can withdraw earnings directly to your US bank account as soon as they hit $10, and my and most Turkers’ experience is that those funds will hit your bank within 1 to 2 business days. That is another terrific advantage to Turking that few work-at-home opportunities provide: the ability to cash out fast. Money can even be sent to your bank several times a day, if you like, as long as you’ve hit the $10 each time.
Thanks for such a detailed and useful comment. I passed on the transcription tasks because they didn’t look all that good. Maybe I’ll give them a shot if I use MT again.
So if you have some HITS still pending approval for more than 2 weeks what should you do? I cant find any answers anywhere on the site about this.
A lot of people let HITs approve automatically. I think it’s 30 days.
I have been a member for about 21 days and in my amazon payments is only half of my balance on mturk, I don’t know why they haven’t updated my balance Is this normal?
@heather
One must do 3 hits per day for 10 consecutive days for the account to be considered active.
The account balance shown on your MTurk dashboard shows what has been approved.
Amazon payments shows the actual cash balance from HITS that have paid.
Requesters have 30 days to pay, but may pay sooner.
You’re missing out on a lot of good hits if you aim for only hits over $0.50. Rather than focusing on the pay of the hit alone, I calculate what my money/minute is. I aim for over $0.10/minute. With batch hits like HomeZoo, for example, I can earn far more than $0.10 a minute, and also quickly increase my number of hits.