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About Amazon Mechanical Turk (for Workers)
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers can earn money by completing small tasks known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs). These tasks can include things like identifying specific content in an image or video, writing product descriptions, answering survey questions, collecting data, and more. After accumulating $1, earnings can be cashed out via direct deposit or Amazon gift card.
General Details 📜
| Status: | Active, Legit |
|---|---|
| Helps You: | Hire Help Make Money |
| Platform Type: | Crowdsourcing Marketplace |
| Opportunities: | Academic Research Participation Data Categorization Data Collection Data Entry Data Labeling |
Key Points 🔑
| Work Type: | Contract, Freelance |
|---|---|
| Income Type: | Active |
| Work Schedule: | Flexible |
| Workplace: | Remote |
| Minimum Payout: | $1 |
| Payout Options: | Direct Deposit Gift Cards Amazon Gift Card Direct deposits are only available for U.S. bank accounts and are only available for some non-U.S. workers. |
| Payout Speed: | 3 days Workers can choose to receive payouts every 3, 7, 14 or 30 days. Payouts are sent automatically. |
| Other Notes: | As a new Worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk, your earnings will be held until you have actively used the platform for a minimum of 10 days, beginning from the day you submit your first HIT. |
Learn more about Amazon Mechanical Turk
Pros:
- Flexibility to work when, where, and however much you want.
- Variety of tasks available.
- Earning potential can be high (some workers have reported earning hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month).
Cons:
- Low pay (many tasks on MTurk pay very little, sometimes only a few cents per task).
- Competition (there are many workers on MTurk, which means that there can be a lot of competition for the higher-paying tasks).
- Inconsistent work (the availability of tasks on MTurk can vary, which means that there may not always be enough work available for workers to earn a consistent income).
- There's a learning curve. To really excel on MTurk, you have to be willing to learn the platform and possibly use third-party scripts and extensions to improve your efficiency.
Tips:
- Carefully read and follow task instructions to prevent task rejections. If you have questions about a task, don't hesitate to contact requesters for clarification.
- Use third-party scripts/extensions. These can be used to increase efficiency, avoid bad requesters (ie. those who reject a lot of tasks), and more.
- Be cautious about working with requesters who frequently reject tasks. Especially when you're new to the platform (ie. haven't submitted many tasks), you want to avoid task rejections as much as possible.
- Take qualification tests when they're available. These can give you access to exclusive and higher-paying tasks.
- Leverage forums like Turker Nation and MTurk Forum for staying informed and up-to-date with the latest news and developments on MTurk. These forums can help you learn from the experiences of other workers.
Note: The pros, cons, and tips featured above are manually curated summaries and/or direct excerpts from our 18 Amazon Mechanical Turk Worker reviews.
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Our Editorial Amazon Mechanical Turk Earner Review
Working on Mechanical Turk can be a nice, flexible way to earn extra money, but don't expect to earn a full-time income from it. The platform is pretty competitive and high-paying work is not always consistently available, so your earnings can fluctuate quite a lot day by day.
Want to write your own review of Amazon Mechanical Turk? Go here!
Amazon Mechanical Turk Worker Statistics
We've gathered 18 Amazon Mechanical Turk Worker reviews from 7 unique countries/regions.
Here are some insights and statistics from those reviews:
Reported Hourly Earnings
Reported Monthly Earnings
Reported Time to Reach Minimum Payout Amount (For the 1st Time)
- Unknown (11.11%)
- <= 5 minutes (0%)
- <= 1 hour (0%)
- <= 1 day (0%)
- <= 1 week (55.56%)
- <= 2 weeks (16.67%)
- <= 3 weeks (5.56%)
- <= 1 month (11.11%)
- > 1 month (0%)
- > 1 year (0%)
Statistics above are based on self-reported data from our 18 Amazon Mechanical Turk Worker reviews.
Help contribute by writing a review!
About the Reviewers
Reviews By Total Earnings
- Unknown (0%)
- Less than $100 (27.78%)
- $100-$999 (44.44%)
- $1,000-$9,999 (16.67%)
- $10,000-$49,999 (5.56%)
- $50,000-$99,999 (5.56%)
- $100,000+ (0%)
Reviews By Age Range
- Unknown (5.56%)
- 13-17 (0%)
- 18-24 (38.89%)
- 25-34 (50%)
- 35-44 (0%)
- 45-54 (5.56%)
- 55-64 (0%)
- 65+ (0%)
Reviews By Length of Use
- < 1 month (11.11%)
- 1-3 months (5.56%)
- 3-6 months (16.67%)
- 6-12 months (11.11%)
- 1-2 years (16.67%)
- 2-3 years (16.67%)
- 3-5 years (5.56%)
- 5+ years (16.67%)
Are you a Amazon Mechanical Turk Worker?
Share your experience with other Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers by writing a review!
18 Amazon Mechanical Turk Worker Reviews
Rating Breakdown
Filter Reviews
The pay is fair and can pay bills in developing countries
This is the best site I have ever worked with. They release your money faster when withdrawing and have a lot of tasks you can work with. Transcription, Annotations, Surveys, Internet Judging and Almost all tasks are available on M-turk.
I highly recommend this site to anyone who would like to work on HITs.
- The hits are easy to work on.
- The hits are paying fairly than other sites
- Bonus is payed when you hit a certain amount of tasks.
- It offers different tasks and surveys. You can earn from multiple categories.
- Offers short transcription task which are easy to be done.
Most task requires more than 80% accuracy which is not easy to maintain.
- Always Maintain high accuracy
- Choose high paying tasks which are easy to be worked on.
- Filter on tasks before working on them
Many surveys to do, you will always be busy
many surveys to choose from
site is slow
don't bother with the low paying surveys
Great if you want to make some extra money
I think Mturk is a great app if you want to make some extra money. Compared to other apps/sites, you get paid pretty regularly. The work is consistent as well, so there's no need to worry about your studies.
I would recommend MTurk to people who want to make some extra cash on the side. I've heard of some people making $120 a month, which is really cool. It definitely won't replace your full-time job, but it will help out with day to day expenses.
- There are lots of HITs available at any given time, so you won't ever have to worry about running out of them.
- You can pick and choose your hits. On Mturk, you can afford to be more picky than on other survey sites as there's many different HITs to choose from.
- Amazon doesn't regulate Mturk very well, so there are a couple scams/rip-offs, and you can't really do anything about them.
- If it looks to good to be true, it probably is. No one's going to pay you $10 just to test their website; it's probably a scam.
- Avoid the $0.01 Hits on Mtuk - unless they look fun/you're desperate.
- Use the Turkopticon Toolbar. It allows you to see how previous Mturk workers rated a requester. You can see reviews: for example, did the requester reject you without good reason; did they pay in a reasonable time.
Best tasks for money website I've come across so far
The availability of tasks
Most tasks pay too low to be worth it. The higher paying tasks usually have to do with coding or writing a certain article
Take your time and keep looking. I look for high paying tasks while doing quick tasks for a little bit of money
There's great potential
It's unpredictable what you'll have to do on this site, as there's just a variety of different researchers and HIT providers. However, there's great potential -- some people have made money from MTurk similar to a part-time or even full-time income.
I'd recommend MTurk to those who would use it seriously and efficiently. There are many ways to enhance your earning potential that includes using scripts. If you're willing to go through learning how to set everything up, you will have great success.
- Abundance of tasks (HITs) that vary in complexity
- Amount of users; a helpful Reddit community
- Low-paying offers
- Rejections heavily impact your ability to complete HITs
- Complete many HITs. New users won't have access to the higher paying HITs as they require certain qualifications that you'll receive throughout your time on MTurk as you gain more acceptances.
- Use MTurk Suite to check reviews for certain HIT providers to make sure their tasks don't have any problems and so that they won't reject you. Once you start filling in HITs, you'll quickly find who the best providers are (least likely to reject, more likely to award bonus payments), so stick to them.
Good side money if you're computer savvy
I would say that it is good to get side money out of this, and with enough time you can earn more that you would expect.
- there are so many new surveys and gigs to do on here
- the music gigs are a good one for me, hearing all sort of different music
- there's no threshold of what you need to earn in order to get a payout
- sometimes the gigs don't pay enough for the labor involved
- there are times where a gig doesn't work
- there are weird qualification that you need for higher paying gigs that are a bit complex to get
- make sure you pay attention to the qualifications and the test, sometimes you can't repeat them right away and you lose your chance on a higher paying gig
- report the Hit if there is no content, always
- make sure you have a good headphone set, you will need it
- I find the tasks that repeat over and over again and work on it as much as possible
- Avoid tedious transcription tasks - a lot of them underpay, and at times, it's really hard to see/hear what you're transcribing
For the devoted freelancers that don't mind monotony
I think it's a great option for somebody who doesn't mind monotonous micro tasks, and who also has a fair amount of patience. It is possible to make decent money via Mturk, but it takes time, and consistency. Wouldn't recommend for the casual or beginner beer money enthusiasts
- Payout is in USD
- Payment is sent directly to your bank account
- You have the option of opting to be paid in amazon credit
- The ability to change how frequently you get paid
- More information about the tasks in comparison to other popular sites
- Ridiculous qualifications that prevent you from participating in the higher paying hits
- The necessity to use browser extensions to get good hits
- Having to constantly hunt and refresh to earn anything decent
- Many tasks are extremely monotonous
- Be patient
- Be consistent
- Complete as many hits as possible
- Don't get disqualified for missing attention checks, it'll hurt your future income
- Use a hit forker or browser extension to aid in getting to the good tasks before they're full
- In my opinion MTurk is not the place for surveys as there are other better options
If you take the time to learn how to turk efficiently you can make decent money
During my absolute best turking period I was making $14-$18 an hour. This was around two years after I had started turking, and while I had definitely become a much more efficient turker at that point, the primary factor was the quality of the work available. On my best day, I was able to make $400 over a twenty-hour period. This definitely isn’t typical; I would estimate most experienced full-time turkers make closer to $8-$12 an hour on average.
In my opinion, Mechanical Turk is better used as a supplemental source of income so you can work on the best work available and not feel pressured to work on tasks with lower pay rates. Without experience, however, it can be difficult to easily differentiate between the two.
Many of my favorite benefits are shared with other online working options. You get to work from home, set your own schedule, be your own boss. What I think sets Mechanical Turk apart is the variety and volume of available work.
- Starting out on MTurk was rough. There is a large learning curve and a lot of the tools and methods turkers use today to increase productivity and efficiency were either nonexistent or still in their infancy when I first started. I spent my first month working on relatively poorly-paying audio to text transcription work. A lot of thick accents, annoying background noise, and technical terminology made this especially painful. I’m not sure exactly how much I was making an hour but I would guess it was around five to six dollars.
- It’s inconsistent. You can be working on a certain type of task for a month, making good money. Then the project will suddenly end and those tasks will disappear. You’re left with scraps, searching for the next good project. There can be significant downtime between quality work being posted.
- Communication with requesters (people who post work) is also a problem. Many will simply ignore emails asking questions or looking for clarification. This can be especially problematic because a requester is allowed to reject work for any reason without recourse. Luckily, although most turkers will occasionally run into issues because of this, it’s not a particularly common occurrence.
- Get a review script ASAP (Beginner) - Review scripts allow you to rate and review your experience working on a certain task as well as to read the reviews from other workers. Aggregates of these review scores are then displayed directly on Mechanical Turk. This will help you avoid investing time working on poorly paying work. The most popular option at the moment is Turkerview.
- Always be looking for qualifications (Beginner) - Work that requires a qualification is often more valuable to have access to because instead of competing with the entire Mturk worker base to complete that work, you are only competing with the other people who have the qualification.
- Join a turking community (Beginner) - Turking communities are places where turkers gather to share quality work opportunities, helpful information, or to just socialize. Frequenting these communities and asking them any questions you may have is a quick way to break through the learning curve.
- Master the art of the panda (Intermediate) - To turkers, panda stands for “Preview and Accept.” It is a way to repeatedly send a request in an attempt to catch a particular HIT. Learning how to best utilize this will immediately increase your earning potential.
- Learn how to write simple scripts (Intermediate) - Many tasks on Mturk involve doing something menial over and over and over again. Learning how to write scripts to at least partially automate these tasks can save you a lot of time and effort (and make you more money.)
