I’ve been sticking to doing online surveys
for money on Amazon Mechanical Turk recently.
After working a lot on MTurk in the run up to Xmas to get some extra
money for the festive season, I’ve just been working fairly intermittently in
the last few months for a bit of extra pocket money to spend on small Amazon
products, such as computer accessories.
Diminishing
returns
I think that generally speaking, it is best
to see MTurk earnings as pocket money, rather than trying to earn it as any
sort of wage. It might be different if
you are in a developing country, but here in the US, the money that you can
earn (with the occasional exception) is generally just too small to make a
great deal of difference. This wasn’t
necessarily true in the past, but I think it’s fair to say that MTurk payments
have overall been driven down over time.
Online
surveys
Surveys are a good example of this
phenomenon. When I started doing the
online surveys for money on MTurk over a year and a half ago, it was common to
see 15 or 20 minutes surveys that paid, $1.50, $2, $2.50, or more. Now the equivalent survey generally pays at
most a sum more like 50c,75c, or, if you’re lucky, a dollar. (My stats are anecdotal, but I’m pretty sure
that the lower earnings aren’t just my imagination!)
Globalization
The worst falls in earnings come with the
general, more mechanical tasks, however, that are open to anyone in the world
to do. These tasks pay less than 10% of
what they did a couple of years ago in some cases. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t
begrudge fellow turkers from the Indian Subcontinent earning an honest buck,
but MTurk is definitely an example of how globalization can sometimes have a
negative effect on workers’ wages.
