Comments on: Amazon Mechanical Turk–Are You Freaking Serious?

By: Jennifer Mattern

Jennifer Mattern — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 19:08:03 +0000

Remember, no matter how much or now little someone needs, “good” will always be relative to other options available. So as long as most other options still offer better opportunities, AMT won’t be “good” for the vast majority of folks.

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 18:54:59 +0000

There are valid points being made on both side of the argument. A large proportion of mTurk requestors are looking to get content for the lowest price possible. However, there are those who pay an adequate (certainly not great) rate for people just looking to make some extra money. That is the key, mTurk is not a good choice for people to make a living unless you need very little money to live. I work with a specific requestor that pays about $6 per 500 word article. I can knock out a few of those an hour for a tidy sum. I have other full time employment so this is additional money and I don’t have to work to find these gigs. So the key is perspective and expectations. If you just want a little extra cash, it can be OK if you find the right situation but don’t think you will make a living off of it.

By: Derrick

Derrick — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 10:33:53 +0000

OMG – who doesn’t see straight through the lies “Turking Away” posted above? Truth is, AMT is filed with tight-wad requesters, greedy to get whatever it is they want done at slave wages. “Turking Away” is probably one such requester, as NO ONE is consistently, or even often – IF EVER earning more than a dollar an hour.

By: TurkingAway

TurkingAway — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 03:26:51 +0000

Hello! Just thought I’d add in my 2 cents here.

I’ve been working for AMT for about 3 months now, and I couldn’t agree with you more!

The price per time spent on most of these hits are freaking terrrrrible!

However, I mostly work for CastingWords, and other Transcription companies (SpeechInk, Claritrans) that post solely to AMT.

It’s not too bad, I make between $800 and $1,000 per month.

I make probably between 5-8 dollars an hour. Of course, I have a lot of time on my hands, so I just do as many hours as I can.

AMT has helped my family out immensely, and we are finally starting to be able to pay off our credit card debt, and are saving up to move. ( This is not the norm, I’m sure. I’ve had to increase my typing speed immensely over the past few months. )

This is one job that I’m glad that I can take with me anywhere. :D ( No more worrying over job security! Yay! )

So for people who are doing all of the small HITs on AMT, I salute you. You have far greater patience than I.

For us typing enthusiasts, all you need is to invest in a nice pair of headphones, torrent some good sound software like WavePad, and Express Scribe, and simply have at it! :) ( Mavis Beacon doesn’t hurt, either. lol )

I also would like to give props to those who mention Google Adsense. The income I make on AMT will be put to good use, doing market research, investing in marketing, and helping me to build and maintain my web site. So that one day, I can cut back on the hours, and enjoy a little passive income. ( I’m going to have to work extremely hard to get there, since I’m such a greenhorn, but you’ve got to start somewhere! )

Good luck to all of you, in your search for online income. :)

~TurkingAway

By: Ronald W. Garrison

Ronald W. Garrison — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:19:32 +0000

I tried AMT very, very briefly last fall. It was clear that I would be working for pennies per hour. Those in tight financial straits, I would think, would be the ones who could LEAST afford to mess with this bad joke. (I suppose I could see it if you live somewhere where the cost of living is about $50 a month.) The one point I can think to make, that no one apparently has made, is: If you are willing to work cheap for a while to grow some cred, then you need a job that actually PROVIDES that. Even an unpaid internship, or a volunteer job, makes much more sense. How is anyone going to know about the 5000 HITS you did for AMT (or any other anonymous situation)?

I mean it—almost ANYTHING is better. For precisely two years, I made daily contributions to Distributed Proofreaders (providing input to Project Gutenberg). I can’t very well promote myself with that, either, but at least I could feel that I was unselfishly contributing to a good cause. But with AMT or any other thing of similar nature, what are you contributing to? It’s DOUBLE-ANONYMOUS: Not only does no one know who you are, but no one knows who THEY are, either!

By: John Minaberry

John Minaberry — Sun, 23 May 2010 21:00:49 +0000

Reading all your posts about AMT is certainly a humbling experience for me. I am but a lowly apprentice just starting out in this writing business, and AMT seemed the perfect place to start. Mental desolation? Egregiously ( great word– how do you say it?) poor pay and a total lack of rights? LITTLE PRISON WORK CAMP? Well, rip the veil from my stupid eyes; I didn’t know! The books and articles said write, write,write, right? Well, I’m write, write, writing and I’m getting paid for it, which is more than I got scribbling in my notebooks. Started out revising sentences for a penny apiece, went to 50 to 100 word paragraphs for a nickel to a quarter, and today I did a 500 word essay for 2 bucks. Two bucks! Praise The Lord, I’ve hit the big time! But seriously folks, I really am just learning, and having to do the research and write a paragraph in 20 minutes– and make it readable– is perfect practice for me. Someday, I’ll be able to peck out a 400 word essay in 10 minutes like that guy up there a few pages, and then it will be time to move on to something a bit more lucrative. Meanwhile, I’ll plug away at the Little Prison Work Camp Apprenticeship Program until I get my licks down, and who knows?, … (See? That punctuation shows what I know!) maybe in the future I can make like 10 bucks for an article. Imagine!

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 05:21:44 +0000

Mechanical Turk is Hell

A couple of days ago I spent a while as “worker” for Mechanical Turk, an Amazon spin-off that feeds tiny bits of work to people, who process it over the internet assembly line fashion.

The chips are heavily stacked against you as a worker. Most of the HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) woefully underpay the worker. And two full days later I have only gotten paid for 1 of my 11 tasks. After reading the impenetrable terms, I find that the “Requester” can arbitrarily reject my work and not pay me. He can wait indefinitely to pay me.

Can you believe Amazon reserves the right to punish me for violating anything in their policies, which they only provide in dense legalese? Explanation in plain English is limited to a few points. Certainly it does not include an explanation of how you are signing access to your bank account over to Amazon, with no further permission required to take your money, which is buried deep in the legal text.

Working for Amazon as a Mech Turk Drone is a sad place to be. It is a place of mental desolation. With egregiously poor pay and a total lack of rights Amazon runs Mechanical Turk like a PROFITABLE LITTLE PRISON WORK CAMP.

It doesn’t surprise me. I used to sell on Amazon Marketplace and they have already made me angry enough to start a blog amazonfraud.recessionstories.net Please check it out and contribute. Amazon employees with inside dirt are particularly invited. Recessionstories.net is available to host other socially conscious sites for free.

By: Yo Prinzel

Yo Prinzel — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 03:48:36 +0000

It’s right here, “many, MANY freelancers have been working longer than me and get the job easily instead of me.” We have all had to start at a disadvantage experience-wise. If you continue to blame others (those people have more experience and they get the jobs easily so I can’t) then you will never get anywhere. It’s a defeatist attitude and it’s not good for the self-employed.

Also, your rudeness and insults are unacceptable. You can disagree, but respect yourself enough not to insult others for their “inability to read,” when you may actually be the one who can’t.

By: Jennifer Mattern

Jennifer Mattern — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 02:53:09 +0000

Especially watch the insults when you don’t have the cajones to sign your comments. The comment policy here is clear — insults are never acceptable if you don’t publicly take credit for your words. I’ll let it slide this once since we already responded, and it would put the additional comments out of context to remove that now.

By: Jennifer Mattern

Jennifer Mattern — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 02:47:49 +0000

Speaking of comprehension, maybe you need to re-read Laura’s comment. She very clearly puts part of the blame on the experience of others rather than finding other ways to convey value to compete. That’s an excuse. It’s a common excuse. And it’s an excuse that condemns freelance writers to mediocrity (not sure I’d even rate MT as high as that frankly) because it’s easier to complain and blame someone else for your shortcomings than figure out what they are and how to move past them.

I’d also suggest doing a bit of research on freelance finances. You’d find out that $9 per hour freelancing in many cases (if not most) actually works out to less than $7.40 under a normal employment scenario. Rates to wages are not directly comparable. Freelance rates to an employee’s total cost to a company are. That’s usually a huge difference in pay to get all things equal. I even gave specific examples recently (possibly on another post). You can find this information specific to your own local area at http://www.Salary.com. In my results looking at several different levels of writing work, it came to about a 30% difference between salary as an employee and what the freelance annual earnings equivalent would have to be to match it.