Amazon Mechanical Turk

People have different opinions regarding Amazon Mechanical Turk. On this site, organizations and individuals offer certain tasks which any Turk member can do for a predetermined compensation. Compensation varies from one cent to several dollars.

The offered tasks are called HITs which stands for "Human Intelligence Tasks". The philosophy behind these tasks is that these are the tasks which human beings cannot do and are doable only by human beings.The MTurk interface is quite simple and friendly. It takes about a minute to join and in the next minute, one can start accepting and working on tasks (HITs). So one can start making money virtually right away as there are always thousands of HITs waiting to be performed.

People have different motives in joining MTurk from earning money to utilizing idle time and killing boredom. I have heard some people making good money while sitting at home. At present the compensation is too low from USA standards. This site is not subject to any fair or minimum payment. It is considered more to fall within the purview of self employment. Payment is credited to one's Amazon account from where it can be redeemed by Gift Certificates or transferred to a US bank account.

Although MTurk is open to anyone internationally, payment system is more favorable to US residents. Persons from other countries can only redeem their earnings by way of gift certificates. It is possible that shipping from US Amazon may result in heavy custom duties in other countries. So one has to be careful.

MTurk earnings are also available in Indian currency. If one is an Indian resident, he/she can get a check from Amazon in rupees.It is understood that MTurk requesters (who assign tasks) used to pay more to start with. But now tasks mostly pay pennies. Some tasks pay as low as one cent. If one is good in transcribing audios, one can earn in dollars for each podcast.

Lot of tasks are repetitive also. For example, I did several repetitive tasks one after the other at $0.10 a task (more like data entry) and I could do about 40 HITs in one hour. Not that bad while sitting at home, sipping drinks and listening music.

Sometimes a few good tasks become available. But they go away fast. When I opened my computer today (April 19, 2007), the MTurk window showed a task carrying a reward of $4 + Bonus. The job was to write an article on real estate investing up to 500 words. I figured to do it in about 30 minutes. By the time I hit accept button, the task had meanwhile been claimed by someone else and assigned.

The major drawbacks with Mechanical Turk are that compensation is too low and that it does not pay cash to non-US and non-Indian residents. Otherwise, the site is quite reliable as it has Amazon at its back and the site interface is quite easy to work with. Moreover, there is always work available.

If you want to have a peep on this program, you can go to http://www.mturk.com/. Best of luck.