…for $1.77 per hour, it’s not quite what you might think…
Hello, from Grass Valley, California!
You may have heard the names: Prolific.co? Clickworker.com? MTurk.com? If not, no worries as they are not quite yet ready for you either, if you want to earn a decent income. What they are is a new breed of ‘crowdsourcing‘ website where a human gives up time i.e. ‘works or performs a task’ for a fractional payment of a very small amount of money.
For your time given, you quickly complete surveys, answer educational questions, rate photographs or complete any number of tasks that can be performed exclusively by your computer wherever you may be. Your payment for the work can be anywhere from $0.01 up to about $2.00. This amount is split between the host of the site and yourself. There’s no police; no binding rules for the process; no guarantee that you’ll actually get paid for what you are doing. Yet, crowdworking attracts more and more people each year. Some are house-bound either by a family situation, illness or injury. Others simply prefer to stay home. Others have their own reasons. Whatever they may be, you’ll put in a lot of time and not make very much money in the process.
In August, 2019, I signed up with what I thought was a small company paying pennies for work to be completed online. Didn’t seem like a big deal to figure out so in I went. I welcomed myself to the world of mturk.com and immediately learned that it’s an Amazon company. Thinking that I must have stumbled on some secret geek sanctum for how to make money quietly online, I was very interested. I soon learned that the reward does not suit the risk.
Amazon created Mechanical Turk as one of the first such ‘microtask’ sites back in 2005. Known sometimes internally by its humorous name, an ‘artificial’ Artificial Intelligence department. Amazon created ‘mturk’ to provide a platform where an employer (‘requestor’ in Turk-lingo) utilizes thousands of freelance workers (‘turkers’) just like you and me who use our own computers and network connections to perform tasks i.e. data entry, ranking URLs on Google, transcribing recordings or tagging photographs for a paid fee. The fees are split between the freelance worker and Amazon. A requestor usually pays 1 penny to 50 pennies for your ‘computerized’ services. Some have made as much as $10 for a single task but that is exceedingly rare. The average Mechanical Turk worker has a median wage of $1.77 per hour according to a recent New York Times article. I stopped ‘turking’ almost as quickly as I started. Here’s a pic of my one month of activity and the reward earned.
The entirety of $1.56. I did NOT work hard for this. Rather, I tried to complete a few tasks to see if I could generate enough of those small tasks to add up to something bigger. Volume of work concept rather than quality of work.
I would love to hear from a Turker or any other crowdworker who’s is making $2,000 or more each month working for this service. Hopefully I will hear from one of you so that I can learn how to do better at it.
If you want to read the New York Times article, which is really good, I’ll post the link below. Know, however, that NYT require you to register as a ‘free user’ when reading an article. No money or ask for info like as in a subscription, just your email to register. Here’s the link:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/15/nyregion/amazon-mechanical-turk.html
Until next time,
Kevin
The best reason to pack your job into your backpack is to be able to travel. We’ve been staying in a small rented farmhouse in southern Tuscany, Italy since early October enjoying a warm and wet autumn. While October was mostly sunny, warm and breezy, November has brought many days of heavy rain, often with incredibly noisy thunderstorms. A dry day for olive harvesting is a rare thing. For friends of ours, who have more than 700 olive trees to pick in nearby Umbria, it’s been a tough time with all the rain. This past weekend, however, the sun came out and we got the call! We quickly packed up our olive rakes and roared off to Umbria.