Nasubi-Inspired-Mission on Amazon Mechanical Turk

by Arun
(Limassol, Cyprus)

Few months ago, I read about Nasubi, a Japanese comedian who was locked in a room for a reality show until he managed to win ¥1 million on mail-in sweepstakes. I found that very interesting & tried to find out ways by which I can make money JUST using internet.

I wanted to see, how long it would take me to win/earn 500$ on the internet. Within few hours of research, I came across M-Turk & it seemed interesting. So, for me, sure, the money is a good incentive, but so is this personal “Nasubi-inspired-mission”.

I found that it is a good way to kill boredom too, some of the tasks are even addictive. I have done quite a few weird HITs, there were few in which I was asked to make accounts & vote for some people in online polls. There are others which ask me to write fake reviews of businesses.

I did some, but soon hated myself for it – I was actually helping someone to cheat. Anyway, this guilt didn’t last long as I rationalized this as : The genius who decided to use Mechanical Turk, deserves to win because he knows how to win.

There are few requestors with whom I shared some emails. One of them posts very technical HIT (which requires Java experience), so I guess he doesn’t get many. I was interested in the work he was doing, we exchanged some emails for a while. There are few tasks which deal with mathematics, they pay good money (& great bonus).

On one day, I made more money than what I would make in ~45 days because of these HITs. Unfortunately, we don’t get those often. I still search for them every day, perhaps they would post it again. On most other days, HITs with “survey”/”study” in them are easy to do.

When I need to improve my approval ratio, I fall back on “Oscar Smith,” they take time/effort, but he never rejects. When I find HITs which pay more than 15 cents & which have allotted time more than one hour, I accept them all before working on one of them.

This ensures that the HITs are not gone & I would have time to work on all of them. As for the last question you posed. Well, I already have a regular job – which pays well. I Mechanical Turk for at most 2-3 hours in a day. Also, since I don’t live in the USA, I am left with very low-paying HITs, so it will be silly to quit job for this.

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