Amazon Mechanical Turk (weird name... I know) works like this:
Overview:
You can sign up for free by going to
http://www.mturk.com/. As you'll notice on the home page, it will show the number of "HIT's" available. (There are usually over 100,000 jobs available at any one time.) Think of HIT's as 'jobs'. Amazon pays you to work these jobs. The best part is that you get to pick and choose what you want to work on.
Now, I will say that you are not going to become a million by working for Amazon Mechanical Turk and you probably won't make enough to quit a full time job but, if you are looking to make a few bucks while kids are at school or taking a nap, this would be a good place to do it. Most jobs pay between $.01 and $.50 but there are some that pay more. What I have found out though, is that the jobs that pay more, are either too time consuming or they want you to give them your email or fill out a survey and then spam you. If I have to put in my email address or any personal information… I don’t do it.
You can review any hit before “Accepting” to work the hit. (Make sure you Accept the request before working on it so you don’t spend time working on something that has been taken by someone else.) Once you complete the task you hit submit. Once the HIT has been approved, you get paid. Some of the HIT’s require approval and take a couple of days to pay, some pay right away or within a couple of hours but it just depends on the job. The work you do on a HIT can be rejected which means you won’t get paid so you can’t just click and type anything you want. It must be legit.
Also, some jobs require qualification to work. Example: To work on the transcription tasks, you have to pass a short test. Most of the test’s are their way of making sure you know the rules and what is expected of you to complete the HIT. The tests are very short.
The Work:
It took me a while to find the HIT’s that were worthwhile and the ones that I could do quickly. In order to save you time, here is what I’ve found and like to work on: (Type the bolded words into the search field to narrow down the search)
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Audio Transcription – I like the ones by the requestor ClariTrans better than CastingWorks. ClariTrans has some transcriptions that are 5 seconds or less, 10 seconds or less, 15 seconds or less, 20 seconds or less and 35 seconds or less. The rewards are between $.03 - $.20 cents but they are quick and easy. The audio is of good quality most of the time and they pay within a couple of hours. CastingWorks audio is longer and I find a lot of their audio to be difficult to understand but, they pay bonuses depending on the quality score you get. You can write transcripts or review other peoples transcriptions for accuracy. You get paid additional bonuses if your transcript gets a high score upon review.
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Results – by requestor Hichame Assi. All you have to do it enter the key word listed into a Google search and report how many hits come back. Pay is between $.05 - $.15 cents. Takes a few days to pay.
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Classify This – by requestor ClassifyIt. You look at an advertisement and then type in who the advertiser is. Super easy and quick! Takes only a few seconds to do each one. Pay’s $.03 cents.
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Bounding boxes – by requestor learninglab2010. You can either draw boxes around images they specify or answer yes or no questions about the work of other peoples boxing. Mindless and easy to do while watching TV or a movie but does take a little while. You have to do anywhere from 8-40 on each hit to get paid. Payment is between $.02 - $.05 cents. They are really picky… I try hard and have had a couple things be rejected by them.
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Products – by requestor Amazon Requester Inc. They will give you an example of a search word/s and you have to say whether or not the result it brought back is a good result of not. For Example: It will say “Chanel perfume” and then show a picture of what the search brought back. You would then say if the result was what you would have expected to see or not. It only pays a $.01 but you can do a lot of them in a short amount of time.
o There are many more things out there. Some other key words I type in for searches on HIT's are: Transcribe, Classify, Categorize, Product, Email, Audio and Website.
Payment
Upon registering they will have you set up an Amazon Payment account. This is where you get paid. As soon as you get paid for a HIT, the amount shows in your total earnings.
From Amazon Payment you can either request a transfer to your bank account or have your earning put on an Amazon.com gift card for you to use on Amazon.com purchases.
Helpful Suggestions:
1) Set up a separate Gmail account for your self that you use for your work from home jobs. Just in case you get involved in something that spam’s you, you'll be safe by having it separated out from your regular email.
2) Don’t give up easily. Like I said before, it will take you a little while to get use to the system and to find what type of HIT’s you want to work on but, once you have that down, you can make okay money for little effort.
