Looking back over my time earning money online with the make money at home site, Amazon Mechanical Turk, also known as MTurk, I thought it might be fun to contrast my best MTurk experience with my worst. Those familiar with MTurk are aware that when things are going well, it can be great fun and a more than decent earner, but when it goes badly it can be extraordinarily frustrating. Sometimes things go wrong because of your own mistakes, but other times you can lose money or get your hit rejection rate dented through no fault of your own. Life certainly isn’t always easy or fair for a turker!
Anyway, before I head off to mturk.com to look for new hits to do today, here are my best and worst Amazon MTurk experiences from the past.
My Best Amazon MTurk Experience
I had a great run when I found an MTurk requester who paid just under 2 dollars for a writing task that took 15-20 minutes and there were lots of hits too! For a month I was making $15-$20 per day for just 2 or 3 hours work. It was all going very well. The only problem was that I was playing fair, but there were other turkers who were defrauding the requester using dodgy software to do their hits. So the requester introduced their own dodgy software in an effort to weed out the fraudsters, the only problem was that the MTurk requester’s dodgy software started rejecting everyone, including legitimate turkers like myself. My best Amazon MTurk experience ended badly with a reduced hit rejection rate, an easy money supply effectively terminated and a sense of annoyance that I still haven’t quite recovered from, but it was good while it lasted!
My Worst Amazon MTurk Experience
Early on when I was new to Amazon Mechanical Turk and I didn’t know any better, I did lots of MTurk hits for a requester. They were poorly paid and I didn’t really read the instructions closely, as I didn’t think it was terribly important if they were rejected. Guess what, the MTurk requester rejected them! But I still didn’t think it mattered much. Then, after a while, I suddenly noticed that there were lots of MTurk hits that I was no longer qualified for. When I pieced it all together, I realized that it was the rejected poorly paid hits that had caused my problems by hitting my hit rejection rate. It took forever and a hell of a lot of grafting to get my hit rejection rate back up. Needless to say, I paid a lot more attention after that, even if the hits were badly paid.
