MyLot no longer an earning site!

One piece of news that I noticed last month was that the MyLot website has been completely revamped and is no longer an earning site.  They seem to be going for a social networking style debate site.

I must confess that I virtually stopped visiting the old version of the site.  The full page ads annoyed me and the earnings seemed to be measured in cents rather than dollars.  Some people claimed to earn a reasonable amount, but they must have been putting in a lot of time, as far as I could see.  Plus, it is always best to treat earning claims with a degree of skepticism in my experience.

Now the website has a cleaner, more user-friendly design, but I'm not sure that I will use it.  I am pretty content with using Facebook and Twitter for my social networking and I'm not sure if the new MyLot brings anything new to the table.

The old MyLot did have its fans.  I've met people online who said they preferred it to sites like Redgage.  But I suspect that there were a lot of people like myself who used it for a while, and then moved on to other earning sites.

The best way to earn some quick cash online is still Amazon MTurk in my experience.  The best way to earn long term is through affiliate advertising and a lot of hard work writing articles that people want to read.

One last thing, I did have some earnings in my account before the MyLot change which have now disappeared (there was a $10 threshold for payments, I seem to remember).  There was only a few dollars in there, but it makes you wonder how much there was in total, if you add up all the earnings money of all the MyLot users?

Total processing time for MTurk payments from HIT to bank account

I get quite a few comments from people asking about the processing time for MTurk payments.  Usually they are new to Amazon Mechanical Turk and panic when they don’t get their money straightaway.  I have to say that although MTurk is one of the quickest ways of earning money online, in that you don’t have to reach a high threshold level of earnings or wait for a monthly payout date, you still don’t get your money instantly.

I thought I would give you a personal timeline of how the earnings system works, starting with me completing the HIT for the MTurk requester, through to the money becoming available in my bank account.  It is written from my own experience, but bear in mind that I live in the USA and the system might work a little differently if you are in another country.

STEP 1

HIT is completed for an MTurk requester.  It then sits in the HIT Status section of my dashboard page waiting for the requester to approve or reject it.  This is often the longest part of the process and it can take anywhere from being almost instantaneous to up to a month.  In reality most hits are accepted or rejected within hours or days – it’s difficult to predict however and depends entirely on the MTurk requester.

STEP 2

Even after a HIT has been accepted it doesn’t get credited to me straight away.  In my experience, it is normally credited to my current balance (found in Account Settings) within 24 hours of acceptance though (and very often sooner than that).

STEP 3

Once the money has been credited to my Current Balance, it can be spent online at the Amazon store.  If I want to transfer it to my bank account, however, I need to reach a minimum of $10 earnings credit to do that.  You will also need to link your Amazon MTurk account to your bank account - it is some time since I did this, but I seem to remember that it took a day of two before my account was set up.  You transfer money by clicking on the “Withdraw or transfer your earnings” link in the “Your Earnings” section of the Account Settings page.  Once you transfer the money, it typically takes a couple of days to appear in my bank account.  Transferring it at the weekend will take even longer.  Once it appears in my account it can be withdrawn or spent as normal.

As you can see from the steps above, you don’t get money instantly.  You have to wait up to a month to get the HIT approved (although usually it is done within a few days).  You have to wait up to 24 hours to get the money credited to your current balance after approval.  It can then take several days to transfer it your bank account.

Disappointed by MyLot

For those of you who have followed my writing, you will know that I have recommended MyLot as a way of making money online in the past.  I must confess though, that despite my initial enthusiasm, I have become rather disappointed with it.

I am speaking in terms of the money making mainly (although the full page adverts can be a bit annoying too).  My earnings on there have been very low.  Even when I spent quite a bit of time on MyLot, I only seemed to bring in a few cents.  I could earn more in ten or fifteen minutes on Amazon MTurk than I could earn in several days on MyLot.

Maybe I am being unfair.  You only make money with MyLot if you are active with it and as I no longer spend much time on it, I make very little money.  People who enjoy the chatter and social networking side of MyLot rate it higher than I do and have commented so to me.  Although I do enjoy social networking, I tend to do all mine on non-earning sites like Facebook.

If you have photos that are of general interest (not just snaps of friends and family), however, then I would say that you would do much better uploading them to Redgage, rather than MyLot.  As well as earning money from the initial upload, you can also earn extra if people stumble across your photos on Google Images etc.  Although you won’t earn a fortune in Redgage either, you do seem to earn more than on MyLot.  I have earned 50-something dollars from Redgage for the photos I’ve uploaded, which is about ten times as much as I’ve earned from MyLot (although most of that money came from discretionary prizes that were awarded to me by Redgage, rather than through direct earnings, I’ll admit).

More Microworkers Payment Problems

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about the Microworkers payment problems that I experienced when I first applied to get my online earnings from my Microworkers account paid into my PayPal.  It took a long time before I received my PIN number from them.  When the PIN number did eventually arrive however, after over two weeks, it obvious why - I live in the US and the letter had been sent from Slovenia. 

Anyway, after I posted about my experience, I received a comment from a reader called Simona who said that she was having problems getting paid as Microworkers had just withdrawn the PayPal option for payment.  Sure enough, she was right when I checked.  PayPal was the standard way for many of us to get our Microworkers earnings in the past, but now Microworkers are saying that workers have to open an account with Moneybookers, or Alertpay.

Ideally, I would prefer my money to be paid straight to my bank account, but I appreciate that can't always happen and PayPal is generally a reliable money site to use and one of the most common methods used to pay out online earnings by websites.  I don’t really relish the idea of setting up another account with a new website just to pay myself the $9 or $10 that I earn intermittently on Microworkers.  The Microworkers Support page states that more payment options (including presumably Microworkers?) would be available soon, but I have waited around for ages in the hope that PayPal would return as an option with no joy and there is still no sign of it happening at the time of writing.

I like earning money online with Microworkers - they are a smaller operation than MTurk but that is okay, I accept that they don’t have as many jobs and I don’t expect to build up my online earnings quickly - but sometimes they can be frustrating.  I emailed Microworkers a few days ago to ask them what is happening but haven’t heard anything back, as yet.  I will post their answer when they reply.