Writing an MTurk blog: A look at the best ones

Sustaining an MTurk blog isn’t always easy.  Like most turkers, I suspect, my enthusiasm for MTurk ebbs and flows.  There are periods where I do a lot of turking, periods where I do just a little each day, and periods where I do no turking at all.  The reasons for this are varied.  Sometimes there are HITs on MTurk that I enjoy and pay reasonably well, so I spend more time on MTurk to exploit them.  Sometimes I am forced to spend more time on MTurk purely because I need some extra money.  Other times, I have other things happening in my life and I haven’t the time, need, or motivation to be on MTurk.

I have been looking at other blogs recently, principally ones that are written by turkers and aimed at other MTurk workers - there aren’t actually that many active ones around, it seems.  The official Amazon MTurk blog, for instance, tends to focus more on the needs of requesters and programmers, than the requirements of turkers.

Judging by some of the other MTurk blogs out there that I have managed to find, many turkers start out with the notion that they can make enough regular money off MTurk to sustain themselves for a long period of time.  Then they gradually become disillusioned if this doesn’t happen and some get angry with being poorly treated, or at the quality of some of the HITs.  Some of the most entertaining and informative writing comes from disillusioned turkers, although their blogs are often short-lived.

“Mechanical Turk Blog” was clearly motivated to write an MTurk blog in order to highlight what he saw as the scams and injustices of MTurk, of which there are many.  I think it is a continual source of disappointment to all of us that Amazon can appear unwilling, or unable, to police the posted HITs better when they are clearly aimed at gathering workers’ contact details for spamming purposes, or worse still, are aimed at collecting personal info to be used for identity theft.  These sort of HITs appear regularly on MTurk, sometimes masquerading as a “survey” or a “website test”.  Other times, turkers are being asked to perform tasks that are of questionable ethics, and/or legality.

Having made his point, “Mechanical Turk Blog” now seems to have melted back into cyberspace.

Turk Lurker’s blog has some entertaining and informative reads in it!  He has a dry sense of humor, referring to Mechanical Turk as the “Slave Yard” and giving his blog the url: “MTurkey”.  Strange that his posts suddenly stop in 2007 and then suddenly reappear in 2011, but these things happen, I guess – maybe his wife had a baby or something?

Eric Cranston wrote an interesting turker blog, but unfortunately it petered out in 2007 after 2 years of posts.

There are many blogs by people on how to make money from home which refer to MTurk in passing, but it they generally just write a single article and they often don’t give you much more information or insight than a general introduction to MTurk for beginners.

Anybody know of any more interesting MTurk blogs?

How much money can I make with HubPages?

What is HubPages?

HubPages is an online knowledge-sharing website, where members publish informative articles, known as “hubs”, and interact with other members, who are nicknamed, “hubbers”.  

As well offering membership of an online community and a source of knowledge and information, HubPages also promises, and in many cases delivers, much bigger earnings than the average online money-making site.  

Whereas most sites offer rewards in cents, Hubpages earnings are more often measured in dollars.  Making money with Hubpages is not instant, however, and most of the people who’s Hubpages earnings are large have achieved it through hard work over an extended period of time.

So how do I make money?

Money is made through advertising, principally through using Google Adsense and Amazon adverts.  

The Google Adsense money is split between you and HubPages, with you getting 60% and HubPages getting 40%, this is actually a pretty good rate when you compare it with other sites, such as MyLot or Squidoo, where the income rate tends to be lower in my experience (although I can only speculate as neither site publicly reveals the exact proportion of money that they pay out to their users).  

The Amazon rate works on a different principle, you get 4% cut of any money spent on Amazon products after a viewer has clicked on one of your adverts and HubPages don’t take anything from you.  This can work out as quite a decent payout if you strike it lucky and someone buys a computer or TV from Amazon.  (Ebay and Kontara can also be used to generate income, but are used much less by hubbers than Google Adsense and Amazon).

How much money do people actually make on HubPages?

Some HubPages users have done very well, with HubPages earnings of around $300 - $1000 per month.  Most of these people, however, have written hundreds of hubs to achieve this, something that may well have taken them months or years to achieve.  Recently, however, traffic and HubPages earnings were hit for most users by Google altering the way that its search engine works.  

Many Hubpages users have consequently lost between 5% and 50% of their earnings*.  HubPages are currently trying to resolve the situation with a subtle redesign of their site, improving the quality of hubs generally, and by introducing higher earning adverts that will work alongside the Google adverts.  I must say, however, that even for users who have lost out, their Hubpages earnings still seem considerably greater than those on most online earning sites.

*UPDATE: Since the time of writing this, HubPages have introduced changes to the way that their website is structured and early signs are that many hubbers have or are experiencing increases in internet traffic and earnings to their hubs.

You can find out more and/or join HubPages HERE.

See also:  

HubPages: Make money writing online

 
Google Blogger vs Hubpages: which is the best way to make money online?