Talking About Mturk

All right, today we’re going to talk about a website call Mturk. It is located at http://www.mturk.com and is short for Amazon Mechanical Turk. They call it the “artificial artificial intelligence” because it uses humans to do things that machines just can’t do online. Clients put in “HITs” or Human Intelligence Tasks, and people can work on them for them. These tasks range from simple surveys to transcription services to small logic tests. They don’t pay a ton for hits, most of the decent ones pay $.40 to $.70, but sometimes the clients will offer up bonuses.

Now, this site isn’t as in-depth as someplace like Swagbucks. You make an account, set up your Amazon Payments account, and get started. Payments can come through Amazon Payments to your bank account (minimum $10) or through the ever-popular Amazon Gift Cards (minimum $1). You jump in, start working on HITs, occasionally setting yourself up for a qualification test. Now, this isn’t something that you get paid for instantly. Like everything else, it takes time. After you do the HIT, the client has to review everything to make sure it was legit, and then after it’s approved, the money goes on the ledger. When you first start, it takes a while for the money to go from the ledger to your Amazon Payments account, but after you’ve done it for a while, it will go directly in when the client approves your work on the hit.

Now, when you go in, there is a TON of hits to do. Sure, there are some that pay a LOT of money, at least for something like this. I’m going to be very honest with you, I don’t trust those. Remember what I said about not providing information like my credit card number and stuff like that on these special offers, or in this case, HITs? Yep, I’m not even trying those, because if you back out of a hit, it shows as abandoned and it counts against you. So, if there are HITs out there that I don’t trust, how do I find the ones that I do want to work on?

Let us take a look at the website known as Reddit, shall we? If you’ve read my blog before, you know that is where I first found out about websites that are actually legit in letting you work online. Reddit has a fantastic “sub-Reddit” known as Hits Worth Turking For, located at http://www.reddit.com/r/hitsworthturkingfor for your browsing pleasure. It is a good community that lets you know about good hits. The only minor annoyance is all their links first bring you through an ad site, but that’s because those funds go to a community pool used to reward the Redditors that put up the best hits, so deal with it. ;)

Now, as far as I know, this site doesn’t work off referrals, so don’t worry about that. This posting is strictly to let my friends and readers know how to get a bit of extra scratch.

Now, tomorrow’s WILL be one that’s very referral heavy. Tomorrow, I’m going to tell you about Superpoints, one that is very much like Swagbucks, but takes longer to earn rewards, at least it did for me. However, since we’re looking at the long game here, it’s worth looking into.

See you tomorrow,
Tony