Earn freelance income with Amazon MTurk

Amazon Mechanical Turk or MTurk is a freelance workplace run by Amazon.com. There are two kinds of users at MTurk, requesters and workers. Requesters are the ones who request workers to complete tasks. A task is known as a HIT (Human Intelligence Tasks) at MTurk. Workers need to complete these HITs to earn money. Once approved to the MTurk program, workers can search for HITs, reserve those HITs, complete them and collect payment once the HIT is approved by the Requester.

At this instant as I am writing this post, 35,573 HITs are available at MTurk. That means there’s no shortage of work at MTurk and if you don’t start with MTurk now, you are surely going to miss some extra earnings which you would otherwise pocket if you would use MTurk.

Some HITs are available only to Amazon Mechanical Turk users with certain Qualifications. Requesters can use Qualifications to make sure their HITs are completed by users that have demonstrated their ability to give high quality answers. You can obtain a Qualification by browsing or searching through the available Qualifications and requesting ones that appeal to you. Qualifications related to your performance completing HITs are assigned automatically and cannot be requested. Some Qualifications may require you to complete a test before they are granted. Qualifications requiring you to complete a test must be completed within the specified time. Quoted from here.

Let’s now see what kinds of HITs are available at MTurk:

• Translation
• Transcription
• Writing review of your neighborhood
• Writing review of a product
• Writing review of a website
• Evaluating search results
• Comparing two products

Not that hard for an average Internet user to complete, is it?

How do they pay?

Earnings are transferred to an Amazon payments account. From there, workers having a U.S. bank account are paid directly to their bank account and Indian workers are paid via a Check in Indian Currency. International workers who don’t have a U.S. bank account can transfer their earnings to Amazon.com gift certificate balance. That means International workers cannot receive cash payments from MTurk. They are limited to buying products on Amazon from their earnings. But that should not be a reason for International workers not to use MTurk because whether your receive cash or buy products from your earnings, your earnings are going to reach at your end in one form or the other.

Cons

• Amazon MTurk does not provide any power to the workers to defend their case incase the HITs that they complete get disapproved by the requesters.
• The pay is less compared to real life works. (It’s still good!)
• There are a lot of spammers requesting fraudulent HITs at Amazon MTurk like bookmarking their sites etc. (Who cares if the HIT is posted by a spammer or a regular as long as one gets paid!)
• International workers have no option to receive their payments. The only thing they can do is transfer their earnings to their Amazon.com gift certificate balance and buy things at Amazon.com.

Here’s the link to Amazon MTurk.