by Jomvie
(Francis’ Full-time Virtual Assistant)
Some years ago, I signed-up for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk just trying it out to get some extra income while I am just browsing on the internet.
Mechanical Turk call their job/task HITs that mean “Human Intelligence Tasks”. These are tasks that computers are unable to do and that require human intelligence.
I was caught up with the promising shiny object called no attachment, no requirement and fast money. It sounds so cool and easy, right?
So, after I finished signing up, I have to wait for 48 hours of validation since there are too many people who had their way ahead of me. By the way, I am from the Philippines and this means they also need time to run some background check and some sort.
After 48 hours…
I am officially registered and can start working on some HITs. I noticed that most of the HITs that I am allowed to get are less than $0.05? Then I told myself “what the heck” this kind of job is? I scrolled down looking for some pot of gold…scrolling until my index finger got tired of clicking and never had I seen a pot of gold.
So, I decided to take my chances with $0.03 – $0.05. My first HIT was about geographical sites (sounds complicated). I was given a list of places and had to search for it on the Google map that is plain white and black.
Did I say “sounds complicated”? Indeed. Before Google Map became a super intelligent map, human had gone through many pain in search for the needle in a haystack just to make it the super intelligent as it is now today. And take note, its offer is $0.05 per place encoded and it takes 30 minutes to an hour to find the street or city.
After that HIT, I took some time off being a HIT maker. Weeks after I took some time, I came back to make some HITs again. I started with two surveys and finished them less than 5 minutes each and next was writing some random articles.
Assuming I got $0.26 from two surveys and two articles in an hour.. But, what’s the catch? I was denied of one article so I got $0.18.
- How do I know that the requester will not use my article?
- Is it worth an hour joggling my brains out and in the end denied of a $0.08?
I can’t complain any further since there is no employee and employer contract. They can deny anytime they want and the worker can’t do anything about it. So, I find this kind of service unfair. That’s why I decided to quit and never come back.
I would like to share some tips or you can also call it tricks to achieve your goals with MTurk venture, please read the following and follow them by heart:
- Search for good paying HITs
- Don’t bother yourself with 1 cent
- Go for Survey HITs
- Beware of scammers
These are the most interesting tips that I can share to all HITs maker and future HIT maker (watch out for scammers).
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