Back in the game

So, I had pretty much given up on MTurk based on my experience in 2012, but I had left my blog running and noticed it was still getting decent traffic. In fact, it was getting similar traffic to tecbrat.blogspot.com that I have been updating much more regularly.

This, I thought, was reason enough to do some more HITs so I'd have something else to write about.

I was pleasantly surprized by my experience last night. The first HIT I did was a qualifier for human OCR and it didn't seem to submit right, but I got a penny for it and got qualified for that requester. I'll have to give them another try.

My second shot was 25 second video clips that had to be transcribed. They paid a little under 10 cents each. I can't say much about them due to an NDA, but I liked the half speed feature. It reduces the times I had to restart the video. This one, though, I won't auto-accept because I need to make sure I can understand the speaker. Overall: decent HITs.

My third one was good enough to keep me up past my bedtime. For $0.15, I had to mark various parts of a bird's body (Bill, Crown, Nape, Left/Right eye...) Each hit is 5 birds and each bird has 11 body parts to mark. (You can de-select any part that's not visible) I did close to 80 of these HITs. This one was a perfect choice for using auto-accept. The flow from image to image was almost exactly like the flow from HIT to HIT this way. I guess I was making close to $5 / hour doing these tasks. Far less than minimum wage, but far better than anything I can remember making at MTurk prior to this.

All my Mturk work prior to last night had collectively gained me just over $20, but last night alone I made over $10.

That puts me BACK IN THE GAME!