Monday, December 31, 2012

I submitted my first writing HIT

So far my writing experience has not been positive, but it's been my own mistakes that have brought me down. Hopefully I finally got one right. I'll let you know when the HIT is accepted or rejected.

For only $2.00, I was in too much of a hurry to deal with spell checking since I typed it in a plain text editor. Next time I'll probably open Word to do it.

The task was to write a 400 word article about health food.

Check back later for my results.

I guess I didn't type fast enough

I wanted to make sure I could do it before I accepted the hit, so I wrote a 600 word article about a Golf community in Scottsdale AZ. Since I didn't accept it first, it was gone when I went back for it. So, I have a 600 word article and no-one to buy it.

Guess I'll post it here and hope it generates some clicks.

(Desert Mountain)

Reality Check

Today I decided to do some more Tagasauris HITs, tagging 5 photos with 3 tags each. Their tagging software is hard to work with sometimes. I'd type something and no tag would come up. I'd re-type it another way and maybe something would come up. I watched the clock and stopped after an hour.

I had completed nine 4 cent HITs. That's $0.36/hr. Right about now I'd love some of those $0.02 hits I got from Coman Petre the other day.

In my last post about this, I said they had redeemed themselves because they approved my earlier HITs. My opinion of Tagasauris just dropped. Not becuase they cheated me or scammed me, but because I realize just how under-priced these HITs are.

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Slow Approval

In my experience, mTurk HIT approvals usually come within 24 hours. Often within just a few hours. I have 34 HITs I did on the 27th that are still pending. This is well within the Amazon mTurk guidelines, but when you're trying to judge requesters so you know who's HITs to keep doing, having them sit pending is not encouraging. I'll give it a couple more days before I name names. I wouldn't want to give a bad impression of a requester if they are just a couple of days behind.

UPDATE:

The requester I didn't want to name before I'll name now. It was Tagasauris. They approved all my HITs from the 27th. They are back on my good side. They still pay way too little, but until I get serious about the bigger hits, they'll do.

Friday, December 28, 2012

Two days in a row.

mTurk capped me at 95 HITs yesterday. Today it let me get to 99. I'm amazed that it's about a quarter after four in the afternoon and I'm already maxed out.

In a way, this is a bad thing because I can't earn any more money there today. But on the other side, it means I am getting experience at mTurk tasks and learning how I can blow through some quick HITs to build my stats.

Most of these were $0.02 HITs that I could do in 30 seconds or less. (Probably more like 10 in most cases, as long as my browser would refresh fast enough.)

I actually enjoyed them too, so that's a bonus.

Here's a secret:
I was validating questions written by other turkers. The only thing required to submit the HIT was the word "VALID" or "INVALID" so I copied "VALID" into my clipboard and would either paste and submit or type "IN" then paste and submit.

Feel free to comment and let me know what experiences you have had at mTurk.


UPDATE:
I am apparently now unlimited

Capped Out

Looks like Amazon mTurk capped me out at 95 HIT submissions.
I was grading some questions like I wrote before, making sure they were good English, real questions, not subjective and some other criteria.

I got several of their test questions wrong, but every one they showed me looked like I was right, so I marked them as such and explained it. I'll post again if I hear from them about my feedback, or if I get a bunch of rejections.

I'll rate them at Turker Nation depending on what happens with these HITs and feedback.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

I topped 100 HITs!

They haven't all been accepted. That will be another milestone. I actually want to get 100 done today, but so far I'm only at 49.

I ran out of ideas for the parenting FAQ, so I'm tagging images. The pay is very low. I hope to stop saying that soon, as I get the experience and can take larger HITs.

A much better start today

Today I am working on HITs from Coman Petre who is apparently putting together a parenting FAQ. (Who knows what it really is?) I'm able to complete these tasks fairly well. I haven't timed myself, but with whatever distractions and eating breakfast and what-not, I have done 16 $0.30 HITs this morning and 12 of them have been approved. I guess I've been up for about 2.5 hours, so $4.80 is not a big payday, but at least I'm moving in the right direction. (BONUS! It gives me something to blog about.)

For these HITs, I've been writing them in my text editor before I even accept the HIT, then copying and pasting them in to submit. It works well for me, but there is the risk that 2000 other people will get there before me and my HIT will be gone when I get back to it.

These are the HITs I mentioned in "Answer your own questions"


Total HITs Submitted: 75

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Answer your own questions

I found a HIT where the job is to ask a question and answer it yourself. Seems odd and I'm not sure if it will actually pay. If it does, I might do more of them. The requester was not listed in the Fame/Shame thread at TurkerNation.

A little better, but still not good.

In the last hour I was able to do 8 nickel HITs.
(Wow, that sounds like something a druggie would say. LOL!)

I might be able to speed that up a little bit. I'm going to take a break and try again.
These hits were making up questions to go with certain keywords. I am a little concerned that these could be used by some sort of forum spammer, but that concern is not enough to stop me from doing the HITs.

Not a good start today

I got up this morning as if I was going to work at my regular job. I shaved my beard, got dressed, had breakfast fed the pets and got started at 6:35. By 7:35 I had completed a total of 2 HITs! For a whopping total of $0.22. Over 40 minutes of that was WASTED on a survey where the HIT expired, as mentioned in my previous entry. In the nearly hour that has past since then, I have been trying to find HITs for which I am qualified, and that I can do in a reasonable amount of time.

I think that wasted 40 min rattled me a little more than it should have. Maybe I neeed to take the approach of a rider that falls off a horse; get back on.

I'll try another of those surveys and post back my results.

HIT Expired!

Man! That sucks!

I did a SurveyMonkey survey that was supposed to take around 20 minutes. I didn't pay close enough attention to the time and my HIT expired. That means I can't accept it. All that time was lost and it hurts my stats!

Lesson learned: When doing surveys, move quickly, don't give it much thought, and watch your time!

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

HITs Approved

I have submitted a total of 41 HITs and all but 3 were approved already. None have been rejected. They are just pending. After Christmas, My minimum goal will be 100/day. I think I'll be throttled to 100/day until the 29th anyway.

Monday, December 24, 2012

Some Real mTurk Experience

I finally got some serious hitting done. I put in a couple of hours or more, kind of hard to tell because I was up and down for different things, but enough to know that I'm only making about $2.40/hr right now, at best.

I saw something over at Turker Nation that seemed to suggest that I shouldn't share this openly, but I can't see the harm in it. Guess I'll live and learn.

I was doing .08 hits for CrowdSource, picking the top choice for Google searches. I can do them in about 2 min each, when I get rolling real good.

Like I said, not good dollars per hour, but decent for moving my HIT totals in the right direction.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Payment account unsuspended

Surprisingly, joyfully, Amazon fixed my payment account last night!

I'm ready to try again. The next three days are going to be busy with church and Christmas celebrations, but I'll try to squeeze in a few hits so I can blog about them.

I'll again encourage anyone who reads this to check out Turker Nation to learn all about making real money at mTurk.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Waiting on Amz

Something went screwy in making my Payments account, so I can't turk right now. Still blogging and reading the turkernation forums. Looking at other crowdsource type of sites too. See Tec's Money to see my other ideas.

Should be cleared up in just a couple of business days, so that's probably right after Christmas.

Friday, December 21, 2012

Approved and HIT-ing

Almost.

I got my approval email a little earlier than I expected. I clicked on their begin sign-in link and filled in whatever page came up there. It then directed me to create a Payments account. I put in my personal info and tried to move on. I didn't see anything that said I would need to, but got an error message that I hadn't verified my email account with Amazon Payments. I had to open my email, find another message from Amz, and jump through some more hoops. It asked for my personal info again but finally seemed to have worked.

I did a HIT, just to see how it goes. Some crappy-low paying thing, but I just wanted to get a couple of hits in for the experience and practice. It went fairly well. I think it paid either $.03 or $.08. really LOW! This is not the type of HIT I'll be looking for as I go on, but I understand I might have to deal with some of these until I get some accepts and pass some tests.

I tried another hit (The other side of the $.03 or $.08) that specificaly said I should copy and paste keywords off the hit into a google search. When I tried to copy, it would not select. It's in a frame and I can select text outside the frame, but inside the frame the text is not selectable. There might be some work-around, but for the moment I'll just avoid that type of HIT.

SUSPENDED!
Already?
Not really, but that's the error message I got. When I sign in to mturk.com it says my payment account is suspended. I submitted the form for payment customer service to call me and the gentleman there told me that it was actually a delay caused by a new signup process where they have to verify certain tax info. It should clear up on it's own within 24 hours, he says.

Turkers helping Turkers

I just discovered this website: Turker Nation. Just by reading their rules, I am pretty sure I am going to LOVE their site.

I also saw a great thread on HITs You Should NOT Do!

I'm sure I'll be posting more about Turker Nation soon.

Note:
See why I broke my personal ban on surveys

Thursday, December 20, 2012

The Simple Dollar

Can You Actually Earn Reasonable Money from Mechanical Turk?

While I was sitting down for lunch today, I was googling for Mturk related terms and came across this article I had read before. It actualy encouraged me to give it a try. It was written in 2009, so here we are around 3 years later. I'm hopeful that the successes Trent had will have multiplied so that I have even more. I don't want to completely spoil the reading, but Trent said that he made $0.60/hour on some HITs and as much as $19.13/hour on one HIT.

Check out The Simple Dollar Blog to read the full story.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

It's a legal matter baby

Before I started the blog, I thought, "I better read the policies and make sure this is allowed!". Best I can tell, it is. The most restrictive thing I saw said not to publish a press release about MTurk without their permission. They go through a lot of legalese to say that each provider is only doing business with each requester and that Amazon is only providing the Payment Service. They really cover their own backsides as much as they possibly can. That's to be expected. I'd do the same thing in their position.

I'm no lawyer, but even through all their legal babbling it's not too hard to follow.

One thing that was emphasized on their policies was TAXES.
It will be very important as I move forward that I make sure I know how to deal with the IRS.
(I'm an American, in America.)
Amazon and MTurk make no effort to get involved in dealing with any required taxes.

Looking around

Even though I can't do much yet, I looked around the site a bit. I like the fact that I can filter out the low paying HITs. I put in a filter of only HITs $5 and above and got a very nice list. Several of them were through CrowdSouce. I was very happy to see that some of the HITs had long expiration dates and a high volume of available HITs, so if I find a type of HIT that I can do well and do quickly, maybe I'll be able to make a steady habit of some of them.

Getting Started

I had heard of MTurk before, and even helped my wife get set up with an account, but she really didn't get into it, so here I am ready to try it myself. I already had an account at amazon.com from buying stuff there, so the sign up process was actually pretty simple. They said there is an Account Review that is required, and "This process typically takes 48 hours".

I did this before church tonight, so I'll hope to have approval by Friday night.