Amazon's Mechanical Turk

                                                                                                                                  
Now I had already tried several other things before I had run across this. I had saw a lot of posts on this, and although it wasn’t going to make you rich, it was a good way to make a little extra cash.
My initial thoughts were that “Amazon is a very reputable company, I have bought several things from them, this could be a realistic, legit online opportunity”.

Let me start by explaining a little about what Mechanical Turk is and does. Businesses or individuals will post what is called a “HIT”. This is some sort of task they need done ranging from writing an article, proofreading, signing up for a website, taking a survey, and so on and so on. They will assign a set amount of money to be paid for each HIT done correctly. Then you have the workers who choose to take on these tasks by accepting the HIT. Amazon keeps track of what HITs you accepted, who they were from, how much they are worth, and if you are going to get paid for them or not. Here is my experience with Mechanical Turk.

I signed up for a “Worker Account” on a Friday evening. It was very easy and straight forward and took about five minutes. I immediately began looking at the available HITs. The largest paying hit when I got on wanted me to sign up for a credit reporting service that required a credit card and then once they could confirm I had an account they would pay me $10. I am trying to make money, not spend it.

They had a few hits from $2 - $5 to write 500 word, original articles on products, services, or experiences. Most of the things they wanted articles on I didn’t have a clue about the subject. If I have to write an article that long I don’t want to have to spend a couple of hours researching it only to make at most 5 bucks.
The majority of HITs were .01 - .50, most of which were proofreading, signing up for and or testing a website, or some survey. Now I am not going to do anything for one cent so I set my search criteria to .50 and above.
I spent close to fourteen hours over the weekend working on HITs and these were my results as of Wednesday the next week:

I took on endless surveys were I had to put my information on a dozen different sites. I checked listings for spam and pornography. I checked the functionality of sites and did data entry. What I found is that even though it says I accepted 47 HITs, I tried more than double that. A good portion of them were full of links, sites, and God forbid Submit buttons that did not work. Then to top it all off, almost half of the ones I did complete were rejected due to not being able to verify or not following instructions (I am not an idiot).

The places if did have luck in were the educational surveys and the proofreading. I hope if you choose to try this for yourself that you have better luck than I did.  I intend to keep trying it,  doing the things I know will work, but only when I have nothing else to do.

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