Amazon Turk: Easy Money Online?

Part of Amazon Web Services, Amazon Turk is probably the most comfortable sweatshop in the world, owing to the fact that you can work from your couch. Currently in beta format, what it does is create a virtual workspace. Requesters issue small jobs for low pay in the form of HIT’s. HIT stands for Human Intelligence Test and what they mean by that are all those fiddly little things that computers can’t do on their own. Workers do those things.

I’ll give you some examples of jobs I’ve done and been paid for. I wrote a 7 step guide to tying your shoes for 90c. I rewrote a sentence for 4c. I sorted out the correct images from a selection for 8c. I clicked yes’ when asked whether I wanted a penny and got one. I rewrote a paragraph for 40c. I asked a question for 3c. the HIT’s that just pay a few cents often come in a stream, so you can just keep clicking and typing, get into a rhythm and grind a little money. I earned nearly $20 last night while I spent a few hours online and I wasn’t only “turking.

If you’re a US citizen, you can have the money paid directly into your bank account. If you’re in India, you can be paid by cheque. The only other option, which applies to everyone, is being paid in Amazon.com gift certificates. The issue with that is that standard shipping rates do not apply everywhere. South Africa, for example, was blacklisted due to postal fraud. You can still order, but you have to have things delivered using the very expensive courier method. Your other options are to get it mailed to a friend you trust in the States who can then send it on to you, or use a remailer service. If you live somewhere with a currency weaker than the USD, the effort might be worth your while.

An essential link is that of the Turker Nation forum, which is an extremely helpful community and provides an enormous amount of resources to help you optimize the experience, as well as user reports of HIT’s to avoid, people who don’t pay and so forth. They are completely independent, so you also know you’re not getting the Amazon.com party line there.

There’s no interaction between workers on Amazon Turk itself; sometimes you’ll find yourself working on a job which contains 68 HIT’s, suddenly you notice the number dropping faster than you’re doing them and you realize you’re sharing the job with someone who could be anywhere.

There are idiotic demands out there. A lot of the content-producing hits pay barely 1c per word. Some lunatic has also been offering to pay 1c for a 10 000 word article. Rumor has it that somebody copy/pasted the same word 10 000 times and got paid. Good story, but still not worth it.

Other examples of hits are videos to review, games to test, data to clean up, data to locate, images to tag whatever you can think of, really.

Sometimes you get paid for jobs almost instantaneously; sometimes it takes hours, sometimes days. It’s simple to transfer your balance to your Amazon.com account too. It’s just a pity they won’t pay into Paypal accounts.

All in all, it’s far more profitable for Amazon and for the HIT creators than it is for you, but then, that’s the way employment works. People in the first world have complained that third world people keep the rates low by working for smaller amounts than they want to; economic migration crossing all kind of borders there. Basically though, the work is there, you don’t need any particular qualifications, it seems extremely democratic actually, on a global level.