Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Mechanical Turk?

I've been trying to make a few bucks online recently and one of the options I came across was Amazon's Mechanical Turk, where you do small tasks like identify animals in pictures and things that bots can't do for a cent per task or so.  Some harder tasks, like rewriting short articles, reward a dollar or two up to about 5 dollars maximum.

Spent two hours today trying it out, doing as many worthwhile tasks as I could.  Two hours in, I have a whopping 60 cents.  That's 30 cents an hour, over twenty times worse than minimum wage.  To be fair, I have $1.71 that's still awaiting approval, so that'll boost me up to $2.31 for two hours of work for a grand total of $1.16 / hour.  Still shitty.

My take on this website: if you really cannot do anything else or you're stuck with some free time and have literally nothing else to do, go for it.  But it's not a serious source of income at all and you'll probably waste a lot more time than worth the money.

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