Make Money with Amazon Mechanical Turk
Mechanical Turk is a program you can use to do jobs online doing simple work controlled by Amazon.com. They jobs are called HITs. This stands for “Human Intelligence Tasks” but could perhaps be renamed to HUTs: Human Unintelligence Tasks. They are all jobs that definitely cannot be automated, but also take very little brainpower to accomplish.
♦ How make money with Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Mturk (as Amazon Mechanical Turk is known) is not a path to instant riches. In an hour long “experiment” with Mturk I personally made a hair over $6 for 1 hours worth of work. One of the biggest “slowdowns” is reading the “job descriptions”. Once you have done a few, many of the jobs are the same and this can be completed a lot faster. Some people claim as much as averaging $10-15 an hour. That means that this could be the online equivalent of flipping burgers at Mickey D’s. Not a ton of cash, but it takes little real skill.
One interesting way to make money is to use the system while watching TV or a movie. You will go slower of course, but since it doesn’t take you paying too much attention you might earn $4-5 and still enjoy the TV show, which is $4-5 more than you would have earned otherwise
♦ The Work: What are Mturk “HITS”
The HITS are all simple tasks. An example might be browsing through a page of an online catalog and seeing if anything is out of place. There will be thousands of pages at perhaps 1-2 cents per page. To “test” you there will be pages entered with known mistakes. If you just “fake” the system you get ranked lower. Once your rating dips much below 90% it gets hard to find jobs. In 300+ practice “tries” on the site I personally had only 1 job “rejected” so it is not hard to meet their requirements of acceptance.
♦ Big Dollar jobs.
There are jobs that pay decent money. $10 or so. These are not the jobs that can be done quick. Most of these are people that are using it to get people to their “take a survey” for. I will not say that every one of these jobs is a scam, but the few I tried I ended up abandoning, because they wanted me to enter in email etc. within the process. Remember they are not always “Amazon” jobs. Sometimes Amazon is acting as a clearinghouse for other sites. They make sure there are no outright rip-offs, and have a reporting system for scams, but personally I would recommend being careful with giving out any information, therefore stick to the quick and easy jobs.
