Well, I like all things Amazon.com and Amazon Mechanical Turk looks sort of interesting. The one or two HITS that I clicked on look like some kind of surveys-clearly this needs a bit of looking into.
Hey, with a name like Mechanical Turk its got to be good. Though to be honest I don’t really get the Mechanical or the Turk part of the name. Amazon, well, I guess that never made much sense either, did it? So what is it and how do you make money with it?
Good questions. Short answer, I’m not sure.
I signed up the other day and was greeted with something like 500 Hits available. That’s the good news, the bad news is the pay for these Hits ranges from 0.00 to $3.00, with most of the ones I see right off the bat in the 0.03 cents range. These Mechanical Turk Hits also have a time limit, some of them are like 60 seconds, some are 24 hours. If you don’t finish in time you get a Hit listed as Abandoned-so do the Hit quick.
There are Mechanical Turk Hits that pay a Dollar for you to go to twenty blogs and leave comments-with the instructions not to make the comments sound like spam. Hit twenty blogs and leave comments in 24 hours-get paid one dollar. Sadly I am a bit lazy and rarely leave comments with an eye to improving my own backlinks-which may end up being worth more than a dollar to me. So maybe I should look into being a buyer instead of a selling and see if I can a few hundred backlinks for twenty or thirty dollars.
Ok, back to the making money with Mechanical Turk part-I have used one Hit twice-Ask A Question. The time limit is ten minutes and the pay was 0.03 cents. I just wanted to see how it worked. It took a shocking 7 minutes to ask a question that made sense to me and that the system would accept. But sure enough, within minutes my account balance was 0.06 cents. You do have to sign up with Amazon’s payment system to use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
I found one Mechanical Turk Hit that said it would pay $3.00, a veritable fortune in Mechanical Turk money-this was for a paid blog post. Finally something that sort of makes sense to me. I realize this is a pretty new system, at least it’s new to me anyway. So I need to do some more research and find out how your supposed to make money with it. Clearly making a dollar for three hours of work is not the way to retire to the South of France.
Outside of the comments bit, I can’t really think of any other services I would pay for right off hand. Of course, I have just scratched the surface of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and don’t know it’s potential yet. The idea of getting a couple of hundred bloggers writing about something for me would feed my ego, but I am not sure it would be worth 600 dollars.
A few of the things are just flat out odd, like asking a question or re-writing a sentence-what is the purpose of that? I was inspired by one of these questions to write my own blog post about it, so maybe it just turn out to be more of a source of inspiration and less about the nickles and dimes earned.
