Can you actually earn reasonable money with it, or is it a scam? For those unaware, Mechanical Turk is a service from Amazon where you can complete simple tasks in exchange for a tiny payment. For the most part, the tasks available through Mechanical Turk are quick and very simple. You have to do quite a few in an hour in order to earn anything of significance. I decided to try it out for myself. I browsed around the Mechanical Turk website, signed up, and set aside an hour to try to earn some money there.

It took roughly a minute to open an account there — no problem. I basically just wrote in a nearly train-of-thought style, something I would consider a weak first draft for The Simple Dollar, but still readable. Not a good use of time. Note to future self: Not good, but it could definitely be worse. It seems easy — just look at a picture of an item and come up with some short tags to describe it. Ten cents in six minutes is not a win. Chasing them might pay off, but it seems to be a time waster.

You have to at least be aware of the company. Not bad at all! Here are several things I learned that can help someone interested in Mechanical Turk earn more for their time. If you can be given a topic and immediately begin to write something readable on that topic, you can probably do pretty well at Mechanical Turk.

The two biggest earners during that hour — the service review and the piece about email marketing — mostly involved me writing off the top of my head. Of course, if you were to focus that ability towards a passion, you could build a great blog on your own that would provide your own steady revenue stream.

I can see someone who mans a customer support line or something similar actually using Mechanical Turk to earn a bit of cash during the delays between calls.

If you work at a job that has lots of short periods of downtime throughout the day, Mechanical Turk might fit well into those gaps, since the tasks mostly just take a moment or two.

Go ahead and take that test — it seemed to unlock quite a few tasks that paid well. Obviously, they were just trying to filter out people who just wanted to throw themselves at the next available task, enter junk, and move on as fast as possible. Take my experience with the winery — it seemed, at first glance, that I would just be looking up contact information for wineries — easy enough.

What they wanted, though, was a ton of data entry about wines sold at that winery — not worth the forty cents they were paying. Good opportunities seem to pop up all the time, but are devoured quickly.

Hitting refresh helps you get your foot in the door with better Turk tasks. I was genuinely surprised by the experience. If you have the ability to throw down readable writing very quickly, you can earn minimum wage with the Turk — more than I ever expected. Having said that, you can do better than minimum wage with your time.

I value my mental energy at a rate higher than minimum wage. Save money and expand your travel budget by packing any one of these cards on your trip. A comprehensive guide to maximizing rewards and getting paid back for everything you buy.

But the big question is, did you actually get paid? How long does it take to find this out? Post a follow up, please! I made over those four weeks was not nearly worth the time I invested. Sadly, online survey sites are more lucrative that the Mechanical Turk is…but not by much. To answer comment 2, you get paid when you want to. They will ETF the funds to your checking account, or you can use them for merchandise at Amazon.

How long, realistically, do the people who have tried this think they could do it in one sitting. Also, if you choose to claim this as taxed income, do you have to be registered as a business, or can you simply claim it on individual taxes assuming you want to be straight about the whole thing. Are they withholding taxes of any sort? I think trying this out over a longer period of time may yield some interesting results.

One day is useful, but why not do a series and report back to see if it stacks up to working a shift somewhere locally? I tried out a variety of hits several weeks ago, including some that I had to qualify for. At my most lucrative task, I earned.

It took over a week for most of my hits to be approved. Only one requester approved my hits within a day. These hits did not give you a way to contact the requester. These frustrations, more than the low rate of pay, will keep me from exploring Mechanical Turk further. Ditto for their attention. A blog may indeed be more lucrative, but doing it well requires sustained focus over a period of time.

Thanks, this is why I love your site. If there was a lull in class, I would go on and see if there was any quick and easy HITs, and do them. At the beginning of the next semester, I would take all of my earnings, get Amazon. When I did a similar experiment a year or so ago, a lot of the writing I did was not accepted and I only got paid for the really simple stuff.

Let us know how much gets accepted. My question is who pays for these tasks and why? What is the purpose? Thanks for sharing your experience. I tend to get roped into trying these things only to discover what an enormous waste of time they are.

At least Mechanical Turk sounds like it offers some earning potential. But, obviously, if you read the other endeavors, it can be much worse. Mturk is a waste of time. I signed up thinking it was actually going to make some money but I spent so much time looking for decent stuff I could do that it was not worth it at all. I too have tried Mturk and it was a waste of my time.

Yeah, Turk was better when some of those Firefox plugins to speed the work still worked. Can you make money on Mechanical Turk? Yes, by setting up a website to provide useful data and having MTurk users get that data for you. When I was in high school, a few friends and I on IRC coded some JavaScript to run through one of the HITs they gave you an album cover from Amazon.

I do surveys, which I think are a little better, but still not that good in terms of hourly earnings. I have purposely chosen to spend the time that I would spend playing online games, for no benefit at all in the evenings, doing HITs instead.

That might only be five to 10 minutes at a time, but it does add up.

Also, there are certain HITs where, if you do multiples for the same company, they will pay you a bonus or up the rate you get per HIT. I do HITs every once in a while, usually to finance a new book or CD that I want. I got some better-paying side gigs from online marketers who liked the quality of my work, as well.

I tried the turk myself, it seemed cool at first, but I soon realized that my time was better compensated doing some of my surveys. For instance, if you wanted to write a comprehensive blog post, you could make a turk for someone to do some of the preliminary research for you. Seems like a better use of it to me. Who would that somebody be? What is the probability that you get the type of person you are looking for to describe your product or write up a review of your product? After thinking like that, I can see why they pay so little.

But without any pushing, I do it leisurely. Of course, I can make three times as much money at a local business, but for the time being I am homebound, and I like the variety, so it is mostly fun. I think Michael commment 10 sort of hit on the question I was going to ask. Turning this whole thing around, is there anything useful you could use the MTurks for? What about paying someone to creating a transcript of your podcasts? He took all of the images that people created and made T-shirts that he sold on his web site.

Thanks for this post, Trent; I had not heard of MT yet, but probably would have given it a try once I learned of its existence. I had to go to that store anyway yesterday, so I picked up the 3 bottles of cleanser and handed over my coupons. This is just one of a myriad of examples of faster and easier ways to end up with more cash in my pocket than investing time, electricity and — at times, apparently — aggravation trying to earn pennies at a time using Mechanical Turk.

I used mechanical turk for quite some time. Sometimes you get lucky and better jobs can be found on mturk, but not as a rule. Most of the writing jobs are about topics this female has no knowledge of or interest in so I passed. For comment 14 above, did the people who contributed the sheep cartoons get any compensation or royalties from the guy who used their images on his t-shirts? I have a lot of free time in tiny little snippets while I wait for my son to come out of various activities.

While I know there are other ways to make more money, this one seems well suited for the way my life is right now, and I plan to use it sort of like those old Christmas club accounts. My kids are at the age where stuff from Amazon is most of their list. I tried this recently because I like to keep my hands busy when I watch tv or hulu and often end up playing solitaire or the like. Plus, they tell you how you can get paid in rupees but nothing about whether Canadians, Brits, Europeans, etc.

How to make lots of money on Mturk | Mturkgrind - Mechanical Turk Forum

I mean, money is money, but a gift card means you have to buy more stuff. Shevy, you are paid in U. You can cash out either by transferring the money to an American checking account or receive Amazon credit. I signed up for Mturk a couple of weeks ago, to try and make some extra money. For an unemployed student who is actually forbidden by her parents to have a job, mturk is awesome. Are there any other similar websites like this out there? I decided to try out Mturk this weekend and found it addicting.

I just kept clicking and completing HITS one after the other. Now, did I make any money? Not much, but more than I would have made just surfing the web for Fantasy Baseball news or playing an online game — which was nothing.

How Can You Actually Earn Money from Amazon Mechanical Turk

Still, if you want to make some real money, find your passion and see if you can make some real money. If you want to try MTurk in your spare time, then go for it. I just wanted to chime in on this.

After trying Turk today I found it a very poor use of time. There HAS to be a better way to make a few bucks in spare time. I started mturking a few days ago when I read a reference to it on this site in another blog post. Sure, the system is a bit clunky. But if you give yourself hours to learn it, the pocket change you earn during that time is not an indicator of future profits—you will get better, faster, and savvier, if you give yourself a training period.

What happened with me is that on that first day I did some. I spent a lot of time viewing hits without accepting them, simply trying to understand the system. Then I figured out I could order the hits in terms of which offered the most rewards.

Most of the limited extra time I have throughout the day SAHP is devoted to writing for mturk requesters. Not a bad paycheck for time that would have been otherwise wasted. Took me 5 hours to make 20 dollars. No taxes, no gas, just a straight 20 dollar bill on a day off in five hours time.

Had i something to do today, i would not have done it. When you lie down with dogs…. I would clarify your comment to say that a lot of the high-paying tasks are fraudulent.

And since when was SEO content fraudulent? MTurk is a really powerful tool which I have used on a couple of occasions with great success. There are a lot of honest and straightforward workers who get the job done, and likewise a lot of requesters with legit needs. Most of the high-paying HITs are frauds. Experienced Turkers know which jobs not to touch. Most people make just a few dollars a day. Also, some requesters will reject work. One rejected an article I wrote because it had one typo.

Scammers who want free work will reject. Actually, I looked at their terms of use, and US citizens outside of the US are not allowed to participate, so shhh!

Better than me wasting the time watching tv. My friend has made much more than that but she devotes more time to it than I but I have trouble sitting still when there is other work I need to accomplish. I followed a link to a recent post you made about spending less than you make, and began registering for AMT.

From your timeline, Trent, I assume you did not read the user agreement. It took me about 20 minutes to read it, and saw a couple of red flags. Comment 18, Jason,said they developed a script to make it easy to get the task completed. You specifically acknowledge and agree to the following: Once you figure out which types of tasks are going to be worthwhile, you can complete a good number of them in just an hour worth of work.

Your review is very useful, even not quite positive. There must be better sites than Amazon Turk for that sort of job. The paying system is not nice for people outside US. Hello, after reading this amazing article i am too cheerful to share my experience here with mates. Your email address will not be published. Just sign up to The Simple Dollar Daily and start saving today. However, the rankings and listings of our reviews, tools and all other content are based on objective analysis.

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It pays to be able to write comprehensible stuff quickly. Most of the tasks fit well into short breaks. If you do take on a task in the lower price range, look at it first. Is Mechanical Turk Worthwhile? Get A Free Trip This Summer by using the Right Card Earn credit card points toward your favorite ways to travel. Avoid Foreign Transaction Fees with These Top Picks Save money and expand your travel budget by packing any one of these cards on your trip.

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