If you’ve looked into making money online, chances are you’ve come across Amazon Mechanical Turk. From reviews, Amazon’s worker marketplace seems to be one of the best around and in high demand, but is there more to this than meets the eye?
In this article, we’ll provide a breakdown of what becoming an MTurk worker is like, and whether it’s worth the initial grind phases, how much money you can make there and the types of tasks you will perform.
At the end of Mechanical Turk review, I will also reveal a better alternative that has allowed me to earn full time passive income online, so keep your eyes peeled.
Anyhoo… onto the review 😉
Table of Contents
What Is Mturk?
Amazon Mechanical Turk is a micro work site where businesses hire temporary workers to complete jobs. They can do everything from translation, data categorization, and transcription to business research and surveys.
It’s a lot like Kickstarter, with the exception that people can log on and find work instead of waiting for projects to come their way. Some say it’s called crowd-working or micro-working.
How Does Mturk Work?
The steps below describe how MTurk works: Requesters upload tasks then people accept and complete that work for money (that’s the part you’re probably most interested in).
Behind the scenes, as a customer and an Amazon Mechanical Turk worker, there’s actually a lot more to know. You should be aware of some of them.
One of the difficulties you might face when first signing up on MTurk is not knowing how to go about finding tasks to do. It’s a confusing platform for beginners and might lead you to ditch the website early on.
How Much Can One Make On Mturks?
You can make about $1 to $6 per hour and between $56-$336 each week. That’s a wide range and it really depends on what jobs you pick up. Not a huge amount of money, but not bad as side income.
There are tasks available instantly when you sign up, but some of the higher paying HITs require you to do a certain number before being able to complete them. Your earnings will vary depending on how much time you spend working.
Minimum qualifications of 100, 500 or 1,000 HITs done are pretty common to be able to access some of the better work you can find on there. So you’ll need to be ok with earning really little money initially before you can get to the higher paying jobs.
Why Was Mturks Made?
Jeff Bezos realised the importance of a marketplace that enabled payment to be made for people to do tasks that computers don’t really perform well. For instance, spotting text in a photo is relatively easy for most people – but this is not so with AI software even today.
How Do You Get Started On Mturks?
MTurk.com is a platform for paid crowdsourcing. Once you apply to be a worker, you must wait about 48 hours before being approved for work. You need to input your social security number in order to be considered for work during that waiting period. You also pay taxes on earnings through the platform.
A few days ago, there were no daily withdrawal limits but now the max is 100. Once you hit that limit after 10 days, your account won’t be accessible until the 10-day period expires.
Is Mturks Really Worth It?
If you’re looking for an instant, easy task to complete part-time and the paycheck you need has to be full-time, Mturk is definitely not worth your time. The platform is good but they pay 10-20 cents per job. Extremely low.
This means you’ll need to hammer those jobs extremely quickly in order to hit your $1 per hour target. Not an easy thing to do at all.
There are much easier and better ways to earn income online. Especially in this day and age. You’re worth more than 10 cents per job and $1 per hour – seriously!
What are the program’s pros?
- You have flexible hours
- Anyone from anywhere in the world can work on the platform
- They are a 100% legit platform
What are the program’s cons?
- You earn 10-20 cents per job
- Learning how the platform works takes a lot of effort
- There’s very little work to do for newbies
- It takes a long time to approve completed jobs
- There’s a lot of steep competition on the platform already
Final Word
Amazon Mechanical Turk offers an opportunity that other sites can’t. It’s an easy, relatively cheap way to gain access to a workforce of people wanting to work on more focused and specialized tasks.
However, if you’re looking at it as a place to make money online, then unfortunately you may be disappointed since it pays so low, and you’ll need to spend hours and hours everyday just so you can earn $1 an hour.
