We know that mTurk (short for Amazon Mechanical Turk) is legit and all, but is it worth your time?
How much can you make with Amazon Mechanical Turk? -- realistically of course.
If you Google this question you are bound to find all sorts of varying answers. I came across one post from someone claiming they have made $21,000 ($150 - $300/wk) on the site and another about some guy making an extra $500/mo -- both are some pretty good numbers, especially when you consider that these people claim they are just doing this in their spare time.
But you also find people claiming they hardly make anything, so what's the deal here? How much can you REALLY make?
In this short article I'll be breaking things down for you so that you have a better understanding of how it all works and what exactly you are looking at here. This way you will know whether or not it is a worthwhile opportunity for you.
Overview of mTurk
Amazon Mechanical Turk (at mturk.com) is a crowdsourcing marketplace where developers, organizations and individuals have access to an on-demand workforce. As a worker, you are part of this on-demand workforce and will compete simple tasks for money.
The perks of the job include that it doesn't require and specials skills or qualifications. You just sign up and wait to be approved. Then you can start making money.
Most of the work can be classified as microwork, human insights, and machine learning development. Examples of the many different types of work you can get paid for doing include...
- Paid surveys
- Drawing
- Image captioning
- Categorization
- Youtube video rating
- Research
- Writing
- Editing
- Transcription
- And more
How It Works
When joining you have 2 options:
- You can join as a "Requester" if you are looking to pay people to complete tasks
- You can join as a Worker and make money completing tasks for the Requesters
Obviously in this case, since you are looking to make money, you are going to be joining as a worker.
The tasks are called Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs for short.
Inside your account you will be able to view a long list of the many HITs available.
As you can see below -- there are over 1000 different HITs available as I am writing this.
You are able to simply browse through the entire list or you can search for specific types of HITs and filter the results in other ways.
In the image above you can see that many of the available HITs are locked. This is because I opened a new account and didn't qualify for them yet. I'll talk more on this in a bit.
One thing that you should notice is that there are a wide variety of different tasks you can perform -- and the pay varies greatly as well. Lets take a look at the first 3 examples that were available to me at this time...
- Example 1: Market Research Survey
- For this HIT task you only get paid $0.01 but it only requires you to attempt to take an online survey. If you are able to complete the survey without disqualification then you will earn a bonus. 90 minutes are allowed for completion.
- Example 2: Bathroom Quality Classification
- This HIT requires you to pick the correct answers describing bathroom quality. You have 15 minutes to complete it and the pay is $0.15.
- Example 3: Trace Object Boundaries
- With this HIT you simply trace the boundaries of objects in images. You have a time limit of 60 minutes to complete the task, which is way more than enough time, and it pays $0.60.
Big Differences In Pay!
So the first task would pay me $0.01 if I were to complete it and the third task pays $0.60. The latter pays 60x more!
But then again, with the first task you are getting paid only for attempting to qualify for surveys. If you do qualify you can complete the survey and get paid more.
Lots of Variety
The point here is that there is lots of variety when it comes to the tasks available and you never really know what to expect.
What I can tell you however is that pretty much every task you will ever come across will pay less than $1.
Many of the better paying tasks will be locked to you when you first join. You have to qualify for them first, which means that as a newbie your earning potential is seriously hindered.
Ways to Increase Your Earnings
1. Do More Work and Better Work
Many of the good jobs require you to have 100, 500, or even 1000 HITs completed in order for them to consider you. So you are just going to have to bite the bullet early on and take a bunch of HITs that might not be that great.
It is also very important that you do quality work. The Requesters that are the ones paying people to complete tasks have the ability to disapprove of your work if you do a bad job. Not only will you not get paid for tasks you fail to complete properly, but you also will hurt your qualification values, which you can see here...
2. Go For The More Difficult Tasks
It's pretty obvious that the more difficult tasks are going to pay more. This isn't how it always works, but generally speaking it is the direction things go.
So don't take those super easy tasks if you have the ability to try harder tasks and get paid more.
How Much Can You Realistically Make?
When Starting Out:
When starting out you won't have the ability to earn very good money as you already know.
Let's take a look at an example to better explain it. Below are 4 options that I have available to me as I am writing this. They are all tasks that I can complete right after signing up and require no qualifications...
- 1- Market Research Survey
- Pays $0.01 for attempt
- Allowed 90 min
- We already went over this but since it's an option, let's go over it again. This task pays $0.01 if you just make an attempt to take an online survey. If you make that attempt and end up qualifying then you can take the survey and make more money from it, probably around $0.50 - $2 extra. Attempting to qualify for a survey may take 1-3 minutes while taking the full survey might take 10-20.
- 2 - Bounded Box Drawing
- Pays $0.02
- Allowed 60 min
- This task requires that you trace an image inside a picture, from what I can tell. You are allowed to take 60 minutes but this could easily be done in just a couple.
- 3 - Draw 3D Shapes of Objects
- Pays $0.10
- Allowed 120 min
- Here you draw 3D shapes of objects. This is a difficult task for me to estimate the time for. But I can tell you that it won't take you even close to 120min. You can also get a $0.70 bonus if you do a good job, which would be a game changer.
- 4 - Depth Estimation Task
- Pays $0.02
- Allowed 60 min
- This task just requires you to pick between lines -- you pick which appears closer. It shouldn't take you more than a minute or two.
Do you see how hard it is to give a straightforward answer for how much you can make?
- The tasks vary a lot and what might take on person only a minute might take another person 5 minutes.
- Some tasks pay out bonuses which can multiply your pay many times over.
- Potential earnings might be completely out of your control (for example the survey task - you have no idea if you will qualify and be able to take the whole survey)
When You Have Experience:
I do know that there are people earning $100 or more a week completing tasks on mTurk in their spare time. This is doable but you are going to need experience so that you can qualify for all the jobs that this platform has to offer.
Can you turn this into a full-time job?
Probably not unfortunately. Of course this depends on where you live in the world and the cost of living in your area, but for most people probably not. You'd be better off just getting a normal job.
Payment Options
One of the downsides of mTurk is that you can only get paid in cash if you live in the US or India.
You are still able to work on mTurk if you live in other countries but the only available payment option is Amazon gift card. Now I must say... Amazon gift cards are pretty darn good because you can buy pretty much anything on Amazon.
But what if you don't want an Amazon gift card?
What you could do is sell your gift card online for cash. There are a variety of different websites you can do this on. Raise and Cardpool are both popular gift card exchange websites. Of you could also go to Reddit's gift card exchange, which is a subreddit dedicated to exchanging gift cards online.
It's completely possible to turn your gift card into PayPal cash. The downside is that you won't get the full value. For example: If you sell a $20 Amazon gift card you might only get paid $17 for it.
Why Should You Consider mTurk?
Besides the fact that spending time completing tasks at mTurk is an extremely flexible job that you can do at any point of the day -- and besides the fact that this type of work can be done anywhere that has an Internet connection -- another big upside to mTurk is that there are always plenty of tasks to complete.
The problem with many of the different paid survey websites out there and other sites that pay for completion of small tasks is that you will often run out of available work. mTurk is one of the biggest platforms I know of for completing microtasks and the like, maybe even THE biggest.
There are always tasks to complete -- definitely no shortage here.
...And Why You Shouldn't
For one, completing these menial tasks is not very fulfilling at all. Just think about it, is this really something you want to do with your time? Do you really want to trace images, take surveys, etc.?
Second, while there aren't any statistics provided on the average earnings of members, I'm willing to bet that the majority of people make less than minimum wage.
Sure, it's a great way to earn some extra money in your spare time, but I wouldn't prioritize working at mTurk any more than that.
Definitely don't count on earning a fixed amount of income from this site, especially when just starting out. Maybe once you get the hang of things and gain some experience you can see how much you can make on average, but don't get your hopes up too high.
Conclusion - Worth Your Time or Not?
Is an extra $10 a day worth your time?
What about an extra $20 a day?
Both of these figures are doable -- but the time required to make these amounts can vary greatly depending on the tasks you complete and how fast you are at completing them (and your qualifications).
I know it's a disappointment that I can't provide you with any set figures, such as "you will be able to make $7/hr on average" (not true), but I just can't.
The income you will be able to make here is not reliable or steady by any means. But it still can be a nice supplement to what you already make.
I hope this article has helped you out a bit. The last thing you want to do is get your hopes up and spend a bunch of time doing something that isn't going to cut it for you.
Since you are here on my site -- I would also recommend taking a look at these online income opportunities, some of which have much more potential.
Take care and be sure to leave any comments or questions below 🙂