I recently ran across Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in my unending quest to not have a job. Seeing that it was a reputable company, I signed up and gave it a shot. Here is a review of my first week or so of using this program.
Signup for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is fast, simple and easy. It probably took less than a minute to get going to the money making part of the program. Mechanical Turk calls these HITs and they are simply small jobs that people need done. You can scroll through the HITs and pick which you want to work on. The work is extremely simple like commenting on blogs, labeling images, rewriting sentences or paragraphs, writing short articles, and other quick work. The problem is that Mechanical Turk pays just about what these tasks are worth. A penny or so for labeling images, maybe 50 cents for rewriting a paragraph, $1.50 for putting up 15 posters, etc. In short this is not a place to get rich.
While most tasks at Mechanical Turk pays only menially at best there are some tasks that pay $5 or so. Usually this involves writing articles, rewriting articles, writing fairly extensive reviews, etc. While you could possibly make some money doing this, it is a better use of my time to write articles for Associated Content or work on articles for print magazines. However if you are unemployed, or unable to work outside of the home Mechanical Turk may be able to be a source of income for you. Also some HITs offer bonuses for doing quality work. I have not completed any of these HITs to determine the amount of likelihood of getting bonuses so I cannot really comment on them. Once a HIT has been accepted you have a timeframe to complete the HIT, but in my experience the timeframe is much longer than is needed.
Payment on Mechanical Turk is fairly quick, usually within a day in my experience. Payments are put into the workers Amazon Payments Account. Payments can be transferred into a bank account or used on Amazon.com.
While the payments on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk are not going to make anyone rich, the program is a bit addictive. Once you get rolling it is hard to stop. I have sat for 15-20 minutes completing 1 and 2 cent HITs just because they are fun. If you spend a lot of time on the internet playing games you might as well become addicted to completing HITs on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and make a little money.
