Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, or MTurk as its best known, is the biggest and most well-known of the crowdsourcing and microtasking platforms. For those looking to earn some extra money online, it can offer one of the better opportunities to do just that. But finding the right groove and making Mturk be worth your time can seem confusing and like. Jul 20, 2020 Is Amazon Mechanical Turk Legitimate? Yes, MTurk is completely a legitimate platform. They provide real cash income to registered users without doing any scam with the workers. Though it’s a good platform to work part-time, you need to know which platform van bring a good amount of money. Amazon mTurk (Amazon Mechanical Turk) is a site where you can sign up as a worker and earn money for doing small tasks. The things offered there vary greatly — you might be doing data entry, search engine evaluation, and even writing work. I've personally done all three of those things through Amazon and then some. The commission on this job would be less than $0.01 per assignment, but the minimum Mechanical Turk assignment commission is $0.01. Consider combining multiple HITs into one and increasing the reward. For instance, a job with ten HITs at $0.03/HIT costs $0.40, but a job with one HIT at $0.30/HIT costs $0.36. Jul 11, 2017 Pros and Cons of Amazon Mechanical Turk. So what makes Amazon Mechanical Turk worth signing up for? Flexibility – Do as much or as little work as possible. You can work all day or do a couple of HITs if you have a 10 minutes available. Get paid in cash – Many other survey sites pay out in gift cards or credits.

Technology has helped rid the American economy of many of the routine, physical, low-paid jobs that characterized the workplace of the last century. Gone are the women who sewed garments for pennies, the men who dug canals by hand, the children who sorted through coal. Today, more and more jobs are done at a computer, designing new products or analyzing data or writing code.

But technology is also enabling a new type of terrible work, in which Americans complete mind-numbing tasks for hours on end, sometimes earning just pennies per job. And for many workers living in parts of the country where other jobs have disappeared—obviated by technology or outsourcing—this work is all that’s available for people with their qualifications.

This low-paid work arrives via sites such as CrowdFlower, Clickworker, Toluna, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to name a few. Largely unregulated, these sites allow businesses and individuals to post short tasks and pay workers—in cash or, sometimes, gift cards—to complete them. A recent Mechanical Turk listing, for example, offered workers 80 cents to read a restaurant review and then answer a survey about their impressions of it; the time limit was 45 minutes. Another, which asked workers to fill out a 15-minute psychological questionnaire about what motivates people to do certain tasks, offered $1, but allowed that the job could take three hours.

These are not, by and large, difficult tasks—someone with just a high-school education could complete them easily. And they may seem like one-off jobs, done for money on the side by people with a surplus of idle time. But a growing number of people are turning to platforms like Mechanical Turk for the bulk of their income, despite the fact that the work pays terribly. It’s emblematic of the state of the economy in certain regions of the country that some people consider this type of work to be their only choice. A 2016 Pew Research Center survey found that 25 percent of workers who earned money from online job platforms like Mechanical Turk, Uber, and TaskRabbit went on these sites because there was no other available work in their area.

I talked to one such woman, a 29-year-old named Erica, who performs tasks for Mechanical Turk from her home in southern Ohio. (Erica asked to use only her first name because, she says, she read on Reddit that speaking negatively about Amazon has led to account suspensions. Amazon did not reply to a request for comment about this alleged practice.) Erica spends 30 hours a week filling out personality questionnaires, answering surveys, and performing simple tasks that ask her, for example, to press the “z” key when a blue triangle pops up on her screen. In the last month, she’s made an average of $4 to $5 an hour, by her calculations. Some days, she’ll make $7 over the course of three to four hours.

Erica, who has a GED and an associate’s degree in nursing administration, says the work for Mechanical Turk is the only option in the economically struggling town where she lives. The only other work she was able to find was a 10-hour-a-week minimum-wage job training workers at a factory how to use computers. “Here, it’s kind of a dead zone. There’s not much work,” she told me. In the county where Erica lives, only about half of people 16 years or older are employed, compared to 58 percent for the rest of the country. One-quarter of people there earn below the poverty line.

One reason Erica, who has filled out more than 6,000 surveys on Mechanical Turk and has a high rating on the site, earns so little is that the work simply doesn’t pay very well. But there are other reasons she makes so little that have to do with the nature of the platform. On Mechanical Turk, where she spends most of her working hours, Erica looks out for “HITs,” as assignments are called (for “human intelligence task”), that “requesters” are hiring for online. The tasks that pay the best and take the least time get snapped up quickly by workers, so Erica must monitor the site closely, waiting to grab them. She doesn’t get paid for that time looking, or for the time she spends, say, getting a glass of water or going to the bathroom. Sometimes, she has to “return” tasks—which means sending them back to the requester, usually because the directions are unclear—after she’s already spent precious time on them.

Requesters use Mechanical Turk because they can farm out menial work on the cheap and get that work done quickly—with hundreds of workers each transcribing one minute of an audio file, for example, a final product can be returned in short order. Other sites like Crowdspring, which is an online marketplace for graphic design and other creative services, and Snapwire, a photo-crowdsourcing site, allow companies to get creative work done at a low cost. Solve for the steady state value of real money holdings.

On most of these sites, requesters hold more leverage. While there are forums where workers advocate for being paid fairly, requesters on Mechanical Turk are free to set pay as they please—the site allows requesters to list payments as low as $0.01, merely telling requesters to “consider how long it will take a Worker to complete each assignment.” (Amazon takes a 20 percent fee on what requesters pay workers, double what it charged in 2015, an increase that some workers on the platform say has caused requesters to offer less money.) Requesters can then “reject” work that is submitted if it doesn’t meet their standards. Workers don’t get paid if their work is rejected, or if they have to return a task. Also, some Turk workers have complained of their accounts getting terminated without notice, or of preferential treatment that lets some workers get the special qualification of “Master,” which allows them to get different tasks.

Sometimes, requesters will say that a task will take 20 minutes when it actually takes an hour, Erica says, but by the time she realizes that, she’s devoted enough time to the task that it’s worth completing. Those times, she told me, “I’ve felt so ripped off that I’ve walked away and cried.”

But despite the problems with Mechanical Turk, when Erica and her partner, who works for a food company, have a big bill coming up, she’ll spend extra time in front of the computer. Workers can choose to get paid every day, rather than waiting for a paycheck for two weeks. “I do it because on certain weeks, I can have a guaranteed $20 to send out to pay our bills—when we are completely flat-out broke until the following pay period,” she told me. Recently, Erica says, Amazon’s payments system has been on the fritz, though, and she hasn’t been able to get the money as quickly. The inability to get that $20 or $30 is a big problem in her household—currently, it means she doesn’t have the money to buy food to make for dinner. “I guess I’ll have to improvise,” she wrote to me, in an email. (Amazon did not respond to multiple requests for comment about this article.)

Erica’s experience with Mechanical Turk is not an anomaly. A research paper published in December that analyzed 3.8 million tasks on Mechanical Turk, performed

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