But I only get, on average, a measly one or two offers a month. And of those, I qualify for only about two-thirds of those. Three to six dollars a month isn't gonna put anything more than a bottle or two of beer on the table each month. Daddy needs more.
So last week I signed up for an Amazon Mechanical Turk account, got accepted, set up payment details and I've completed about 80 HITs in the last couple of days. A HIT is a Human Intelligence Task. Basically, the site is a distribution nexus for universities or corporations looking to use "crowd sourcing" to provide raw data in all sorts of analytical projects that researchers or project analysts are conducting. The data is usually, from my limited experience so far, in the form of multiple choice answers to opinion-based questions on simple surveys. They're offered to Amazon "turkers," people like me agreeing to complete tasks for these presenters for a small (and I do mean SMALL) fee and then, if we do as required, we get paid through Amazon. Kinda similar to the stuff I've been doing for the Nielsen Company owned Pinecone Research for years, but much more at my own pace. Unlike Pinecone, I don't have to wait for an opportunity to be sent to me, I just go ahead and pluck it from the usually hundreds of options available on the MTurk portal. Cool right? Well, let me tell you a few of the setbacks I've encountered so far:
Pay is generally pitiful. Often it's just pennies per survey which can take several minutes to complete. Think you can just blaze through it being a radio-button interface multiple choice questionnaire? Nope. They built-in many "attention tester" questions within to catch people spamming through without paying attention and answering honestly. But I've more than once now accidentally provided the wrong option on one of these policing methods and been rejected after wasting 2-3 minutes of my time. No penny for you!
How pitiful is the pay? As stated, I've completed 80 HITs so far, spent about 5 or 6 hours total searching, reading instructions and then completing tasks. Here's my dashboard:
So basically twelve bucks. Yes, there are many, as you can see above, still pending. About two-thirds or so. So let's say they all get approved...that would potentially, on average, work out to maybe $36 or so. If I figure I "worked" some 6 hours on this total (and that's because I'm new and reading every letter and generally approaching this very leisurely, not trying to super-crunch my efficiency rate) it looks like I made about $6 an hour.
Supposedly, there are those, according to several sources including a well-used Reddit subreddit, that actually make a living doing this. Could this be my next "job?" I mean it's peanuts, yes, and like any piecework, it's designed to promote nose-to-grindstone churning to reach even rudimentary goals, but think about it: No commute, no set schedule, work when and as long as and as fast or slow as you like, no "boss," and pretty simple easy-to-do survey questions or other mindless tasks. I wonder what Daffy Duck would say?
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| Eh....It's a livin! |