Making money with the Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) program is absolutely possible. I’ve done it!
What exactly is Mturk?
Mturk is a internet marketplace where businesses and even individuals (requestors) can request the services of human intelligence (Turkers) to perform small tasks that computers are not able to do. These tasks consist of mostly decision making tasks, and opinion based surveys. These tasks are called Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) and requestors will pay you, the Turker, compensation for completing a HIT.
Why I chose to become a Mturker
Like most people interested in the Mturk program, I was looking for a way to make money from home. My goal was to actually make enough money with the program, so that I would be able to quit my full time job, that I absolutely hated!
The sign up process was easy enough. Amazon requested my basic information, and also required me to wait a few days to confirm everything. Once my account was confirmed I was able to start working on my first Human Intelligence Task (HIT).
My initial impressions
Most of the higher paying HITs have qualification requirements. This means that the requestor prefers to have only experienced Turkers working on their HIT. In order to reach a higher level of qualification, you must scrape the bottom of the barrel for a while by performing a bunch of lower paying HITs. Eventually as your experience grows, more and more opportunities will open to you. Thats when the potential to make a bit more money comes in to play.
How much money can you make?
Like I said, in the beginning you will have to perform a bunch of low paying HITs in order to improve your ranking and to start qualifying for some of the higher paying HITs. These low paying hits payed anywhere from .01 cent up to .10 cents. and consisted of survey taking, and various other tedious tasks.
Once I completed around 50 HITs I started to notice higher paying hits becoming available to me. I started to regularly perform hits in the .25 cents range all the way up to $1. Naturally the higher the paying the HIT is, the longer you can expect the HIT to take to complete. Generally speaking.
I personally never stuck with Mturk long enough to reach what could be considered a full-time income, but I spoke with many hardcore Turkers that make up to $100 per day with the program.
Why I decided to quit Turking
The more time I spent using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program, the more I realized it wasn’t the solution I was looking for in terms of making money from home. I quickly realized that in order to achieve a full time income with the program, you must dedicate an incredible amount of time per day performing HITs. Although $100 per day from home sounds great, the 16 hours of work needed to achieve that sounded less than alluring.
The work from home alternative that I found
After spending many months with the Mturk program, I decided to look elsewhere to try and find a program that could help me make money from home without having to invest such a significant amount of my time into it every single day. I found a website called wealthyaffiliate.com. Its a completely free website that I used to create my own online business that makes me money from home every day. I have a full review of wealthy affiliate HERE if your interested in learning more about it.
Do you have a experience with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program? Tell me about it in the comments below.