Can You Make Money with Amazon Mechanical Turk?

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk services, (MTurK) what is it and can you actually earn reasonable money with it?

Just in case you haven't heard of MTurk , Amazon Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing marketplace from Amazon that we can look at in two ways. On one side MTurK is available for developers of tasks such as surveys, research projects, polls and many other service needs. And on the other side where you can complete the simple tasks in exchange for a small payment.  For example, you might look at an image and describe it in ten words for $0.08. You might fill out a multiple-choice survey for $0.10. You might be asked to write a product review for $2.50. There are higher paying tasks like making predictions about political events $16. (~ 120 minutes).  For the most part, the tasks available through AMT are quick and very simple. The problem is that, individually, most are not very big earners. You have to do quite a few 'tasks' in an hour in order to earn anything of significance.

Amazon describes the MTurk as:

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually. This could include anything from conducting simple data validation and research to more subjective tasks like survey participation, content moderation, and more. 

MTurk enables companies to harness the collective intelligence, skills, and insights from a global workforce to streamline business processes, augment data collection and analysis, and accelerate machine learning development.

While technology continues to improve, there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as moderating content, performing data deduplication, or research. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce, which is time consuming, expensive and difficult to scale, or have gone undone.

Crowdsourcing is a good way to break down a manual, time-consuming project into smaller, more manageable tasks to be completed by distributed workers over the Internet (also known as ‘microtasks’).

Well, can you, can you earn money? 

To help answer your questions I decided to try it out for myself. So I logged on created a payment account. I logged into the dashboard so I could browse around the Mechanical Turk website. I began my tour to see how well the interface is designed.

You access the details of the task by expanding the Task Description in the top gray bar

This view gives you the description of how to achieve the task and any other special instructions.  I jumped around a bit to see the amounts being offered and the types of tasks being requested. I found many simple tasks listed from: Transcribe all of the purchased items and total from a shopping receipt (actual task description) with the allotted time of 2 hrs. with a reward of .09 cents. The .09 cents is about the average reward. The highest reward of 1.14 and was for Audio Transcription: Transcribe a chunk of audio following the style guide [location] and was allotted a 4 hr time frame. The mid-range is around .25 one of the quarter rewards was for - Estimate how likely certain conclusions are given an example English sentence (also actual task description) with allotted time 60 minutes and a payout reward of .25 cents. There are a few offerings in the .62 to .88 cent range as well. I have to say I got discouraged and found it hard to imagine anyone making much money for their efforts. So I surfed the web a bit and found one bloggers experience 

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My Task Log  (By Trent Hamm) 

(Ref: http://www.thesimpledollar.com/can-you-actually-earn-reasonable-money-from-mechanical-turk/)

8:46 AM – Signed up for Mechanical Turk. It took roughly a minute to open an account there – no problem.

8:47 AM – Chose my first task – write a 350-500 word article on “email auto res-ponder marketing” for $4. I’m just going to churn it out off the top of my head.

9:02 AM – Done – if that type of “off the cuff” writing is accepted, maybe Mechanical Turk is a decent way to earn money. 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. I’m going to try categorizing some images at a penny a pop for a bit.

9:08 AM – I managed to do six images in six minutes for a whopping six cents. Not a good use of time. Note to future self: stay away from the single-penny tasks.

9:09 AM – After browsing some tasks, I decided to try a series of really short questionnaires from MasterCard for $0.10 a pop.

9:18 AM – I was able to do five of the dime surveys in eight minutes – totaling out to just under $4 an hour. Not good, but it could definitely be worse.

9:19 AM – I decided to try some simple product categorization for a nickel a pop. It seems easy – just look at a picture of an item and come up with some short tags to describe it.

9:25 AM – I managed to complete two of them in six minutes. I actually completed three, but one was lost to the Turk’s horrible page design, which eliminated everything I had filled in because I hadn't clicked on the “Accept HIT” button. Ten cents in six minutes is not a win.

9:26 AM – I take on a task that involves looking up addresses for wineries at $0.40 a pop.

9:32 AM – Should have read more carefully, as it requires entering a bunch of wines from each winery as well. Six minutes work for $0.40 is NOT a good deal.

9:36 AM – I notice that if I sort by dollar value, some higher-dollar entries will pop up and then disappear before I can accept them – $6 to $10 a pop. Chasing them might pay off, but it seems to be a time waster.

9:37 AM – I take a short test to “qualify” me to do some higher-value HITs. Apparently, they don’t want just anyone writing service reviews. You have to at least be aware of the company.

9:41 AM – I finish the test – but the ones I would be “qualified” to do are now gone.

9:45 AM – I spent five minutes looking at really awful HITs. If they pay a penny a piece, if you can’t do them FAST, they’re not worth it.

9:46 AM – A moment later, I found a service review, enabling me to describe a service I received for $2.55.

9:50 AM – I finished the review, earning $2.55 for four minutes’ work. That task was actually the one I was “qualified” for because of the earlier test, meaning I invested eight minutes to earn $2.55 – or $19.13 an hour. Not bad at all!

The Outcome

Trent spent a total of one hour and four minutes there and earned a total of $7.61 (assuming everything Trent did was accepted), giving an hourly wage of $7.11 for his effort. Trent said he probably could have done better than that if weren't logging what he was doing as he went along. I noticed that Trent was able to find rewards in a higher dollar amount than I was. Meaning there are probably times the site is more profitable than others.

So you can see from this users experience it is not exactly a get rich in one sitting type job. However, I would say this. If there is anyone out there that has a computer and Internet access that tells me they cannot find work to make money. Well they would have whined to the wrong person. I would take them by the ear and set them down in front of the computer and say, “Let me show you a few things.” 

I have found from just the little bit of time (two months or so)  I have been exploring and researching possible money making venture available online – that there are ways of generating some income rather quickly for just a few hours a day. I was able to pull in over $400.00 in a couple of months. Now I know that certainly does not pay all of the bills, but it certainly was encouraging to know the resources are out there. So If you had to make ends meet you would be able to find the resources online to assist you to do so.
Personally I probably won’t be utilizing Amazon Mechanical Truk much. I am glad that it is available and hope people are able to get the earnings they need from it.

In summary I do believe you could make at least minimum wage say around $7.25 to $10.50 an hr. if you really worked it (I'm not sure there is 8 hrs a day 5 days a weeks worth of work listed). One strategy could be to use it during your downtime to make it more productive and over time cash out when you reach your goal - like to purchase something you didn't quite have the money for - you could set a goal and work it off until you reached it.