I Got Paid for My Prayer on Mechanical Turk

by Tina Botwin
(Calgary, Alberta, Canada)

1. I’m motivated to work on Mechanical Turk for a little bit of extra spending money. My husband and I recently bought our first home – a fixer-upper – so we’re mortgage poor. MTurk allows me to purchase some items off Amazon that enhance our home without the money coming from our already strapped chequing account.
2. The most unusual HIT I’ve done is one that asked me to say a prayer for this gentleman and the woman he loved to get back together. It gave words to say and then had to record your voice saying them. The prayer also asked for good fortune for the MTurker completing it and paid pretty good for a short, quick HIT so I did it.
3. Some of the most lucrative HITS I’ve had is writing short articles that include certain keywords. Generally you have to write up to 200 words and include a short phrase within that, word-for-word (e.g. include the phrase “orthopedic dog bed”). These HITs generally pay $0.50, but you can really write anything, as long as it isn’t plagiarized, so it doesn’t take very long to do.
4. I find there’s a lot of HITS that expect you to do a lot for very little. There are HITS that pay just a couple of cents that can take forever, like going through a series of 100 photos to determine if they meet certain rules of decorum. I try to avoid these.
5. I probably make about $2/hour. I strive to make $1 per day. Some days that’s easy if there are a lot of good well-paying HITS that I qualify for and some days it’s not.
6. I like the flexibility of MTurk. I’m not committed to anyone in any way. It’s something I can do while I have time to do it and drop when it’s no longer working for me.

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