Is Amazon Mechanical Turk a good online opportunity?

Review of Amazon Mechanical Turk

Product: Amazon Mechanical Turk
Overall Ranking: 60 points out of 100 or 3/5 stars
Price: $0 to join
Owners: Amazon
Website: www.mturk.com

What is Amazon Mechanical Turk?

Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) was one of the first and is probably the best known micro job marketplace. AMT also called MTurk, utilizes human workers to complete small online tasks for a fee.

AMT is based on the idea that humans are capable of carrying out certain tasks that computers cannot do, such as researching data details, taking surveys, labeling, responding to a quiz, writing small articles, and many more.

The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a varied, on-demand, extensible workforce and gives workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it’s convenient.

The tasks are called HITS (Human Intelligence Task)
In the past, tasks like this were accomplished by bringing in personnel on a temporary basis (which is time-consuming, expensive, and difficult to scale) or have gone undone.

Who is AMT for?

Basically, anyone in America can join, but Amazon MTurk no longer accepts people from all around the world. The reasons for this:

• Amazon was having trouble verifying these accounts and a lot of fraud was occurring from outside the United States.
• There were many requester complaints about the quality of work from foreign IP addresses

Hence the worker pool of cheap labor is getting smaller every day. Some requesters feel it is honest to pay a worker $1-$3 for an hour’s worth of work.

The majority of American workers, will not work for so little. New, international, or naive workers were the ones completing these tasks. Now, this mediocre work is not being carried out promptly anymore.

A survey by Follow the Crowd  found the following:

Members see performing HITS as work and are principally motivated by earning.
Earnings vary, but in general, doing HITS on AMT is low wage work: high earners make ~$15-16k/year
Workers aspire to earn at least $7-10/hr, but (newbies especially) do lower-paid HITs to increase their reputation and HIT count.
Many Turkers choose AMT because they cannot find a good everyday job or need other income. Some are housebound, others are in a situation where completing HITS is one of the few options they have to earn.

What you need to apply:

All you need to sign up for this site is a valid e-mail address. If you already have any kind of Amazon account, then your current login should work without needing to create a new account.

PROS and CONS

Pros:

• There are lots of different types of work.
• Approved payments from Amazon.
• When you have the right skills it is possible to earn a decent wage.

Cons:

• Difficult to find good-paying work.
• A lot of low paying requesters.
• Some scams to look out for, avoid high paying HITS for little work.
• It may take a bit of time to find what HITS are best for you.

How it works.

The system is open to anyone to become a requester (the people who provide the HITs) The requester puts money into an account with Amazon, the worker is paid when the submitted HIT is approved, AMT collects a 10% commission on the rewards of a HIT, it’s the requester that pays AMT the worker receives the announced reward in total.

There is a large variety of HITS and the amount paid for the different hits also varies greatly. Requesters can require Workers to meet certain criteria or have certain Qualifications to work on their HITs.

Here is an example of the type of tasks that might be available.

AMT tracks the percentage of your completed HITs that have been rejected (work can be rejected by the requester if they consider it has not been carried out correctly).

Your percentage of rejected work needs to be low, to qualify for the more lucrative work. And early on when you have only completed a small number it is very easy to mess up your percentage. So when you start, pay particular attention to this.

There is also quite a bit of low paying work there too, where the equivalent hourly rate is $3.00 or less. At first, however, you may have to do these types of tasks. Many requesters require that you have completed 100 or more HITS before being allowed to do their work.

How much to join?

To join it’s free with no start-up costs whatsoever.

My final opinion.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is not a scam, it is totally legitimate.
Personally, it’s not for me, I don’t like doing all the tasks for a very little reward that is necessary when you start, but if you persevere it might be worth it. AMT is an unregulated marketplace where it is difficult to earn a fair wage.

If you think you might be interested check it out. You could also visit the forum for AMT workers, www.turkernation.com. This site has areas for many of the main requesters and can allow you to find good, well-paying work. To prevent spammers from ruining the site, when you first join, not all the forums are available to you. You have to be a member for a certain amount of time and make several posts first. If you behave, read the rules and adhere to them, you will find it to be a very good resource for finding work on AMT. There are many people on the forum who make their living with AMT.

My Verdict: Recommended

There are other platforms like AMT that you could consider if you are interested I have listed just 4 here, but there are more.

www.clickworker.com
www.crowdflower.com
www.mobileworks.com
www.crowdsource.com

Please check out my preferred  platform for work from home internet marketing

If you have any experience with Amazon Mturk or if you have any questions or comments please leave them below, I would love your feedback!

To your success,

Peter