Mechanical Turk Basics

Mechanical Turk or M-Turk is the place where I earn the most consistent amount of money. I’ve read a lot of comments online stating that the website is a rip off, or not worth the time, but that’s absolutely not the experience I’ve had. I would say most of those people started an account, were inexperienced and gave up too early.

A little about Mechanical Turk. The name is a reference to The Turk. This was a chess playing machine of the 18th century. People could play against The Turk and most lost to the machine. Later, it was revealed that The Turk was not really a machine at all. There was a person, a skilled chess master, hiding in a compartment, controlling the dummy. Similarly, Mechanical Turk allows humans to help today’s computers and AI perform tasks.

If you already have an account with Amazon, you can use that same log in information to sign up for Mechanical Turk. Amazon is not always hiring new workers, so it is not a guarantee that your account will be accepted automatically. Most people hear back from Amazon within a few weeks. When/if your account is accepted, you will also have to sign up with Amazon Payments. To sign up for M-Turk go to www.mechanicalturk.com and click learn more about being a worker.

For this website there are two payment choices. One, you can have money added to your Amazon gift card balance. You can transfer money from your account whenever you want, but you are limited to once a day. After transferring your money to your Amazon gift card balance, it will show up in your account within 24 hours. The other option that I personally use, is to transfer earnings into my Amazon Payments account. I recommend transferring your money daily just because I have heard horror stories about other people having their M-Turk accounts closed by Amazon, and the workers losing any earnings they had accumulated. I’ve never had any problem like this and I make sure to follow the terms of service, but I still don’t take chances. Anything in Amazon Payments or on your Amazon gift card balance will be safe. Anyway, once my Amazon Payments balance reaches at least $20, I transfer that money to my bank. If I make the transfer by at least 5 p.m., it will show up in my checking account balance the next business day. Some other workers, or turkers as they are commonly called, have their money transferred to Bluebird cards. So you don’t necessarily have to have a bank account to get paid like this.

Once your account is accepted and you are able to complete tasks, my main advice is this: don’t screw up! When you complete a task and submit it, the requester has the option to reject it. If your task is rejected you aren’t paid for it, and that hurts your approval rating. Many requesters will specify they only want people with a certain rating or higher to do their tasks.

For example, here is the qualifications for just one hit that’s up right now.

They want the turker to have at least 100 approved hits, an approval rate of at least 90%, and be located in the United States. When just starting out, a few rejections can really hurt your rating. Sometimes the rejections come because the work wasn’t completed correctly and other times it is because it’s a bad requester.

When you first begin, work will be limited. Once you get to 1000 approved hits, more work opens up. For the first ten days you can only complete 100 hits a day. There are two basic types of hits. The first type of hits are called batches. These are requesters that pay a small amount of money, sometimes just 0.01 for turkers to do a quick task. You can do these tasks over and over again. Sometimes it is typing information from a shopping receipt, audio transcription, determining if an item fits into a specific category, drawing bounding boxes around an image and many other tasks. If it is a big batch from a good requester and you can do the hits quickly, this is a good way to make money. I’ll go over how to determine if a requester is good in my next post.

The other hits are surveys. These are both market research and university studies. Most of my money comes from this type of hit. I look for any surveys that pay at least a dollar for ten minutes of my time. This averages out to $6 an hour, and even though it is under minimum wage I still consider it worth it. One reason is because there is a good chance I’ll complete the task in under 10 minutes. It’s important to always read the questions carefully and answer honestly because your data is being used in studies that students have spent months or even years working on. They do throw in attention checks too, and if you fail them you’ll be screened out with no compensation. However, as many studies as I’ve completed, I can speed right through the demographics section or basic questions that I’ve answered thousands of times. Even if it does take the entire 10 minutes, that’s fine. This is supplemental income that I’m earning while I sit on my couch in my pajamas, listening to music or watching a movie. I’m not spending gas money to drive to a second job, having to eat lunch out, or putting wear and tear on my vehicle. I’ll go weeks or sometimes months without working on M-Turk. There’s no obligation on my end, if I feel like working I work. If I don’t want to work, I’m not going to get fired. I just won’t earn any money that week. This would be really worthwhile for a stay at home parent. It would also be a good option for a college student without enough free time for a job, or a retiree who just wants a little extra income.

When I’m actively turking, I usually earn anywhere from $40 to $80 a week. That’s with me doing it in my spare time. I wouldn’t recommend using this as your main source of income, but it’s great to supplement an income. I can pay my bills with my job, but this allows me to have extra money for things that I want but don’t need. Right now I’m saving for the Nintendo Switch.

One thing I want to stress, you have to pay taxes on your money if you make over $600 in a year.  Last year I made a little over a thousand dollars and I reported it when I paid my taxes. I didn’t really get the hang of turking until well into last year. This year, I’ve passed my 2016 earnings.

When I first started, the hardest part about M-Turk was that I spent more time searching for hits than doing them. There are scripts that you can install and use to make turking so much easier. That’s what I’m going to cover in my next post. For now I just wanted to give a basic run down of what Mechanical Turk is all about and set some realistic expectations.