Reviewing Amazon Mechanical Turk

I saw Amazon's Mechanical Turk a little while ago, and figured I might as well give it a try and see whether you really can make money at home.

I tried several of the tasks out: if you're going to judge something you should give it a fair try.  Overall, I wasn't impressed.. unless you're able to get at the really well paid tasks (audio transcription seems to be the place) you're only going to earn pennies per hour.. and being in the UK, I ran into problems with the payment side.

What is Mechanical Turk?

For businesses, Mechanical Turk gives access to a global workforce of people, on-demand.  For workers, it's a way of making money online, doing a variety of tasks in your own time. 

Tasks include adding comments on somebody else's blog, rewriting text, searching for videos, transcribing audio or video, or completing surveys for university research.  Payment is made when the requester is satisfied.. so this weeds out the sort of person who would enter rubbish and expect to get paid for it, though it does add the risk that a requester might just take the work and reject payment to get it for free.  I assume Amazon has something in place to check that requesters don't cheat, though.

Working..

The first thing I noticed once I'd signed up is that the pay for some of the tasks is abysmal.

I bugtested websites in my last job.  I liked testing, so thought I'd check these tasks out first.  The HITs I found for website testing here were more about feedback than actual testing. 

I took one anyway.. a website selling cards and a variety of gifts.  The questions were about the look of the page, colours, whether you could find things easily.. easy enough.  However, it also expected you to compare price and availability of items on similar websites.  This part was unclear.. was I expected to check one or two items, or be thorough and check something from each category.. and there was quite a range of products. 

Doing a "non-thorough" job might just lead to your work being rejected, but when they're paying $0.30, do they really expect you to do their pricing research for them too?

Getting what I thought was a reasonable answer to these questions took around half an hour.  Doing more of these tasks would work out (in pounds) as 40p an hour.. assuming the requester didn't reject your work because you hadn't been thorough enough in comparing their prices vs competitors.

Forty pence an hour: the National Minimum Wage in the UK is £6.08.. I know this is a "make money at home" deal, but that's a serious difference there.

Moving on..

I found a task to transcribe business cards.. you're provided with scanned images of cards, and the task is to copy the info into a form: name, address line 1, 2, phone number, etc.  Low pay again.. these were around $0.02.. but I figured these would be easy enough to do while listening to music, as well as being the kind of thing you could spend 15 mins on here or there.

The first two were training cards, which checked your input against their records.. fine.  I went for the next one.. the first "real" one.. and it was upside-down and horribly blurred.  Rotating and zooming this made no difference at all to the readability, and I couldn't even guess at what it said!

One of Mechanical Turk's features is being able to take or leave tasks as you please.  I skipped the HIT for the blurred image.. I guess over time, requesters will see that some HITs always get skipped, and check or remove them.

I squinted my way through one after that which was justabout legible, then skipped more.. then gave up.  At $0.02 per HIT, these would be okay if they popped up on screen and you were able to just copy them quickly and move on to the next.  Low pay.. but low effort.  However, squinting at text, and zooming and rotating slows you down, and therefore lowers the hourly pay.  Worse, any time spent on a HIT that you end up unable to complete is completely unpaid.  I think I submitted one good HIT while skipping five.. I spent more time on unpaid skipping than I did on low-paid typing.

I saw, but didn't even touch, tasks such as "find a piece of jewellery like this one worn by somebody like Snooki in whatever show", or "find the address for this generically-named-business".  These tasks typically paid only 1 cent per hit.. wearing out their worth by the time you've finished reading the full instructions!  I wouldn't even like to hazard a guess at how long it would take to track down suitable results for some of these.. and what if you can't actually find something, or something the requester likes?  No pay.

The well paid jobs in the system seem to be audio transcription, which require a qualification test before you can do them, but pay between $8 and $16 per HIT.  I applied for a test for one of them, but heard nothing back.. so couldn't even try them.

The next best paying HITs are surveys.. mostly surveys from some university research department, but also the odd bit of market research.  These pay around $0.50 to $1, with some getting up towards $2.. and weren't too bad to do.. some of the psychology experiments were even interesting.

Payment..

Payment is made after the requester has approved it, and once you've earned more than $10 you can get it cashed out in the form of a gift voucher - to your Amazon.com account. 

When I signed up, it created an Amazon.com account with all the same details as my Amazon.co.uk account.   Mechanical Turk is global.. so they advertise.  But the payment.. the whole reason you'd actually bother to work for the site.. seemingly only works out for the Americans, or those with a US postal address.

This is where Mechanical Turk falls flat on its face for me.  Here's why..

I earned about $16, so I decided to cash it and buy some pretty nail polishes.. it'd be guilt-free spending in a way, as it wouldn't be asking my boyfriend to pay.  However, I discovered that many companies on Amazon.com won't ship a .com order to my address in the UK.

I eventually found a company that would ship.. and then got hit with the horror that is shipping and handling.  Two bottles of nail polish: about $8.  With P&P: about $15.  On top of that, they wanted to charge an additional $20 in shipping and handling.  Obviously I'm not going to pay that!

I had a quick look at other items, but they all had the same issues.. extortionate shipping and handling.  I'd be better of spending the shipping and handling fee on buying the item itself from the UK, and not bothering with my Amazon.com voucher in the first place!

Right now, what this means is that I can't spend the money I earned via Mechanical Turk.. and so there is simply no point me doing any more work for the site.