Thursday, April 28, 2011

How much money do you earn online with Amazon MTurk?

How much money do you earn online with Amazon MTurk?  This is good question and a relevant one for someone who is weighing up various ideas to make money online.  In my experience Amazon Mechanical Turk is actually a relatively straightforward option for making money online, as it is free to sign up to and once you have got used to the set up of the site, you can easily find out details of what each Amazon MTurk hit (task) entails and how much money that you will earn for its completion before you click to accept it. 

If you want actual earnings figures for MTurk then I will give you an idea of how I work and how much I earn in return for completing MTurk hits.  I tend to work in stints of two to three hours per day on MTurk.  Where possible, I do hits for MTurk requesters that I have worked for before, as then I know that there is a good chance that I will be paid and I also have a rough idea when.  For those two or three hours work, I would normally expect to come away with somewhere between and $8 and $18.  There may well be MTurk workers out there who do much better than that, if so, please feel free to comment.  I think the most that I have made is $27 in a half day but that is not typical for me.

On my bad days, a lot of my time is wasted on trying to find suitable MTurk hits.  On the good days, I find hits straight away and get straight on with it.  I don’t use any programs to cheat, though I am aware that there is software out there that some people have experimented with, such as software for generating reviews, blog posts, written articles etc.   

There are people who say that they have stumbled on reasonably well paid tasks that they can complete a lot of very quickly and they’ve come away with earnings of  $200+ for a day’s work, but that has never happened to me.  I would also remind people to be wary of the very high paying hits, as many of them are scams, designed to get you to hand over personal information.

I am relatively cautious when it comes to choosing jobs, but my wife is more experimental and that means her MTurk earnings tend to be more variable.  You can sometimes find lucrative MTurk hits by looking around and trying things.  But one risk of doing a lot of completely new MTurk hits all at once is that sometimes the requester will reject all your hits, either because you didn’t understand the instructions properly and did the tasks wrong, or because you have been unlucky and got one of the dishonest Turk requesters.  This can damage your rejection stats and effect your future work, as well as waste your time.

2 comments:

  1. Hi,
    I have been working on Mturk doing HITs for over a year now and I used to just work a couple hours a day and didn't make much money. Now I am totally working just for Mturk and have figured out how to make more money and am able to averag $10-20 a day. That is fine money for me as I am a senior and just need it to supplement my income.

    As you, I concentrate on HITs I have worked on and that pay rather quickly. I have received many bonuses too. I communicate with the Requesters a lot and find out what their payout schedule is if I have not worked for them before. Most are very forthcoming, which helps.

    I use Turkopticon, I get a lot of good HITs there and it saves time and I keep a list of good keywords to find HITs I want to work on.

    I think it is a great way to be able to work from home or on your laptop at Starbucks..LOL
    I transfer as soon as I make $10 and that way I have a good amount building up in my bank account.

    Thanks for your comments and keep on Mturking!!

    Marji

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  2. I have up and down experiences with MTurk. Sometimes I am doing fine, but then I have a period where it really frustrates me! :-)

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