Is Amazon Mechanical Turk the best online money making option?

While browsing around on Mylot awhile back, I came across a topic related to Amazon Mechanical Turk(Mturk). I clicked on the topic, and read that another online user has made around 1,600 dollars since May on Mturk. I personally found this somewhat staggering since I’ve been a member since April, and haven’t earned no where near that much. After doing some research of my own, I found that many online users actually make decent money using Mturk. Unfortunately for me, I haven’t been one of them. All of this got me to thinking; Is Mturk a gold mine for those seeking for earn extra cash online?

First lets get into what Amazon Mechanical Turk is. Mturk is a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that enables computer programmers (known as Requesters) to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are unable to do yet. This is Wikipedia’s defintion. Mturk is involved with the Amazon Web Services. To give a brief summary, workers sign in and do tasks called HITS(Human Intelligence Tasks). After doing the tasks, they submit the HIT to the requester who then reviews the HIT, and determines whether or not to pay the worker. The quality of the HIT has to be to the liking of the requester. It’s a lot like Microworkers, Minutueworkers, and other sites related to doing online tasks. Now that we know what Mturk is, lets continue discussing more about Mturk.

So what kind of HITS do workers do on Mturk? Well they are various. They include writing articles, doing surveys, doing rewrite of articles, and more. It’s very important to read the instructions carefully of any HIT that you accept. Otherwise, you run the risk of not receiving payment. Mturk has been criticized by many people for the payments for doing tasks. Most of the tasks only pay cents. Many of them are repetitive, and require the worker doing them many times to see anything significant money wise. I’ve been a member of Mturk since April of this year, and I haven’t made much myself. However, I will admit that I don’t participate as often as some others might. I can imagine that people who spend quite a bit of time on Mturk are able to do fairly well. Payment through Mturk can be made either to your bank account, or you can use your balance to purchase things on Amazon.

So is Mturk a gold mine for online workers? I think it could be for those who are willing to put in the effort. Just like anything else in life, it takes time to see results. I wouldn’t classify it as a gold mine for me personally, but I do enjoy adding to my amazon.com balance. For me it’s just a way to earn spare cash while being online. It’s good knowing that I have money to purchase something off of Amazon if I want. It’s also encouraging to see that others are having success on Mturk. If anyone is interested in joining Amazon Mechcanical Turk, visit the the website at www.mturk.com. Thanks for reading.