Review Of Amazon's Mechanical Turk

So far I have been on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service for exactly two weeks trying to make some additional money from home. I have made a total of $72.84. I am pretty conflicted about the service. Firstly, there is absolutely no monitoring done by amazon. That means if you do work for a specific user, and he or she doesn't pay you, guess what? Outta luck. Amazon does absolutely nothing about it if you are not paid. A useful method for dealing with this weakness in the service is to download a plugin for Mozilla Firefox, which is called Turkopticon. It lets you(and anybody else who uses it) rate requesters. That way you can get some idea of how fair a requestor will be if you do their work.


Secondly, although there are an abundance of jobs to do on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, there is not an abundance of good jobs to do. Many jobs pay cents or nickels and are simply not worth your time. I think one of the most important things about making money on Amazon's service is selection. I did one specific job which paid $2.00 per HIT(Human Intelligence Task), and it involved doing a google search and entering information from the top 10 results. I did one first to see if it was worth my time. I was able to complete it in 4-5 minutes on average. With this specific job I was making over $10 an hour, which isn't bad from the comfort of your own home. That is why it is important to refresh constantly if you are using Mechanical Turk. Good jobs do come up, but they get eaten up by the workers very quickly.


Lastly, there is quite a significant amount of spam starting to appear on the service. By spam, I mean requesters who are posting jobs that require you to click on advertisements and enter in your information to sign up for a service and so forth. This can be combated with the addon I mentioned earlier in the article. Despite these weaknesses, I think the service is pretty good if you are looking to make some extra spending cash immediately by doing relatively mundane tasks. I will continue to use the service and make updates as I proceed.