I was going to post this somewhere in the ladies only portion of the site but since anyone who uses amazon.com can sign up, I figured I would post it somewhere that anyone who may be interested can find it. This seemed like the most appropriate place for such a listing.
I wouldn't call this a second income or a way to supplement your main source of income but I do find it very useful and am glad I signed up.
In an effort to neither encourage or discourage anyone from checking this out, I'll save my personal input and advice for the bottom and try to include only the necessary and factual information about Mturk.
Amazon Mechanical Turk or
Www.mturk.com Is a crowdsourcing internet marketplace which allows businesses (requesters) to post HITS (Human Intelligence Tasks) for individuals to complete in order to accumulate earnings.
Human Intelligence Tasks are simply things that humans can do and computers cannot such as selecting the image with the more desirable angle or by inputting the exact letters or numbers into a text field from a given photo.
Important things to know about HITs:
• HITs are generally very simple but some are more complex.
• Not every worker is approved to accept every HIT. While some HITs require no qualifications others may require workers to obtain or meet specific qualifications of varying difficulty.
- Some examples of qualifications include:
"Total approved HITs is not less than 1000"
"HIT approval rate (%) is not less than 95"
"Location is US"
• HITs are reviewed and either approved or rejected, a high percentage of rejected HITs reduces greatly the number of HITs you're qualified to complete so taking your time to read the instructions is important and if you do not understand how to complete the hit you may "return" the HIT by clicking the box just to the right of the "accept hit" button.
• Paid HITs can range from $0.01 per hit to over $80.00 and some offer a bonus for exceptionally long tasks or for quality work.
○ HITs that pay $0.01 - $0.15 each are generally simple, quick and require little to no qualifications.
Some examples of these HITs include: "Given an image of a receipt, extract store phone number, date, and the list of product codes and prices (get bonuses for long receipts)." or "Given the organization's name, find its country, issue area, and website (if applicable)" And "Ask or Answer questions about an image with a fellow Turker."
HITs like this, in most cases, take well under a minute to complete.
It helps to know that the more familiar you are with a requesters HITs, the layout of the information and what you're looking for, the faster you can zip through them and the more you earn.
○ HITs that pay $30.00, $60.00 etc. are generally time consuming transcription tasks. The length of the audio or video you're transcribing determines how much the HIT pays. These range anywhere from 10 minutes up to several hours and require many qualifications.
○ A limited number of HITs paying $2.00, $5.00 etc. are available, most are surveys. They link to external sites where you will answer basic screening questions. Some of these you will not qualify for and will have to return the hit but some you will be automatically rerouted to complete the survey, most are quick and several others last over 20 minutes while a few can take up to or over an hour.
Signing up and getting paid
Signing up for Mturk is easy but it does take more time than what you're probably used to when signing up for things online. You will need to have an amazon.com account in order to sign up. After submitting the information on the signup page Amazon then has to approve your account - I've never heard of anyone being denied an account - It is not instant, it can take a day or two to get the email letting you know your account is approved.
At that point you can begin accepting HITs right away.
You are not able to cash out your earnings until your 10th day after completing your first HIT successfully.
• Note that you must not only be approved but you must complete successfully at least one HIT to begin the 10 day wait before you can transfer earnings.
Earnings, shown in USD, are very easy to keep track of and after the 10 day wait, they then be quickly transferred to the workers amazon.com gift card balance.
Another option would be, with a bit more time and information to create a merchant account with amazon.com, link it to you bank account (prepaid card accounts are not accepted) and choose to have the earnings transferred into your account.
You're able to transfer earnings into either up to one time per day, no matter how small or large the amount. Transfers to your gift card balance are nearly instant, having earnings sent to your account takes several days.
I think that pretty much summarizes the basic info and I hope it provides anyone who may want to look into it with the info they need to get started.
I stumbled upon mturk on my own, went in blind and it took me a while to get to where I felt like I was able to earn enough on HITs to make it worth my time.
There are a few things I wish I had of known early on so maybe my personal opinion on a few things can save someone who wouldn’t find it worth the time the trouble of even signing up or launch someone just starting with enough knowledge to begin earning more much sooner.
Most important thing I came to learn
1000 HITs that payout $0.03 per HIT and take hardly any time at all (because they are not only easy, but there are thousands of identical hits available & the more there are of that hit, the more comfy you get with that style - the more money you get to spend on lube from amazon.com) is WAY more rewarding than hunting down the few $2 or $5 30 minute surveys that have different requirements and just take up too much time.
Another good thing about doing low pay, quick hits - your number of successfully completed HITs increases quickly and you're qualified for more HITs as you hit certain milestones such as 500 HITs, 1000 HITs , 5000 HITs & so on.
A couple of tips for finding more HITs you qualify for
By clicking on the qualification tab you can see the different things requesters may require, If you have the patience to go through these and take the qualifications you think you may be able to meet then you will then be able to complete those HITs. Some are as easy as answering what gender or age or other basic info and some are crazy hard like … math and shit. Ew. I quickly hunted down the ones that approve you to complete adult content and sometimes I get to do HITs that let me categorize porn clips - ;D
The first thing I'd tell anyone who may be on the fence -
Would be that I don't get any sort of kick back or gold star if you sign up. None of the info provided was intended to coax anyone into clicking on some affiliate link, mturk actually doesn't have a referral reward system at all if I am not mistaken.
Second,
You wont make hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting on your ass clicking pics of carrots but you will earn enough to buy a cute pair of shoes or a new pocket pussy when you wear out your old one.
My earnings and other irrelevant ME stuff.
In a little over 8 months I've accumulated a grand total of $743.22 with weeks of inactivity mixed with days I for whatever reason cranked out hundreds of HITs.
Most of this was spent on eyelashes, clothes I wasn't willing to spend my cash on and other random things I otherwise would have went without.
I can jump on mturk when I notice my conditioner is running low, crank out a few HITs and have it delivered to my door before I'm SOL - I think that alone is awesome because I just fucking hate shopping at stores in general and it's almost like it's free kind of cause if I wasn't doing HITs on mturk I'd probably be either sleeping or racking my brain for an idea on how to cure my boredom.
Anyway, I'm a lonley wierdo and I rarely have a ton of shit going on so if anyone might have an issue or a question about the whole process you can feel free to PM me and I will genuinely help as best I can.
Peace. Love. Unity. Respect. - Belle