When my last caregiving job ended and I was needed at home more, I had to find a way to supplement my income quickly and in the most economical way possible, preferably without having to leave home at all. The internet has made this a reality, but there are a lot of doubtful options when you begin the hunt, or opportunities that will just take more time or effort than a person has, such as blogging or running a website.  I finally stumbled onto a website called Mechanical Turk and what I read seemed to make sense and have some promise: No specialized skills required – check. Work from home as your schedule permits – check. Get paid daily through direct deposit – check. Others who are successful advise you on how to increase earnings – check. There’s even the possibility of being sought out as a private freelancer if you provide quality work. Nice! Additionally, the background of the site lends to its credibility: Mturk.com opened in 2005, is one of the first of its kind and is the largest, most well-known microtask platforms. It’s owned by Amazon and has over 500,000 users from over 190 countries who flock to it 24 hours a day to make some quick cash through businesses and individuals who post tasks to be completed by online workers.
Now for the caveat: if you google this website, you could get scared off before you even start. The main source of contention by critics is low pay, of course - nothing unusual and the very same thing everyone complains about at any job - that the site is not worth the effort when specific earnings are not always a given. They want a guarantee of minimum wage. However, the very nature of the site itself, the fact that you are an independent contractor, and with hundreds of thousands of tasks to choose from at any given time, your earnings and success (or lack of) are solely up to you.  There are many variables at play and reasonably-speaking, there’s no real way to know how many hours the critics are actually working and whether or not they are utilizing all of the resources available to make it worth their while. Starting out at a penny per task (data collection/entry, tagging images, transcription of audio/video files, categorizing products, watching a video, completing surveys)  on up to a couple of bucks, some tasks only take a few seconds to complete, others take a few minutes. The more tasks you complete, the better your Approval Rating, the more the better-paying jobs that open up to you over time. If you have the time and desire to learn the tips, tricks, tools and techniques offered by more successful Turkers, you can ramp things up to bring in hundreds to thousands a month like they do. Analyst, writer and online entrepreneur, Mike Naab, who averages $150-300/week and wrote a book about being a successful Turker says, “…you can probably expect to average $6-12/hour…”
