Slight frustration

I just capped out on one of my favorite HITs. It's the English speaking one I mentioned in an earlier post. At the moment, they only allow up to 3 hours of audio from any one person. Guess I've done a lot!

Plus, the $1 or $2 HITs I did a day or two ago are now posted at $.60 and $.75. Still not horrible for MTurk, but I hate the idea of doing the same work for less pay. I kind of hope the turk community holds off and shows them that we need the better compensation for our time.

I'm looking for another batch HIT group I can work on before I go to sleep tonight. If I find anything worth mentioning, I'll probably update this post.

OH! And there's a HIT listed on HITsWorthTurkingFor that requires 5000 approved HITs. That's almost unbelievable to me, at the moment. I've barely done 500, and 130 of those aren't approved yet.

Looking forward to my 1K milestone.

EDIT:
Well, I did more 25 second transcriptions. I'm not really fast enough at them to make them pay well, but It's probably good practice. Maybe it'll at least get my accept rate up.

Unlimited

I don't know how it's determined, but my HITs per day limit has either been removed or raised. I have done over 130 HITs today, and Amazon hasn't stopped me yet.

Of those HITs, 129 are still sitting in PENDING status.

I'm encouraged by the fact that I'll reach another milestone of 500 accepted HITs. That will open up some otherwise restricted HITs.

Next stop: 1000

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Most of my HITs today were $0.16 each, reading lines of English text into my computer's microphone. There is the occasional technical glitch, but when it's flowing smoothly, it's about $9.00 or more per hour.

A new favorite!

I have a new favorite requester: Visual Information Processing Lab at NUS

These are the Follow the Bouncing Mouse HITs I mentioned earlier.

I was fortunate enough to pick up a $2 version and I timed myself on it. It took me 8 minutes, so I figure that's about $15.00/ hr.

If only there were a steady stream of those!

If you're looking for good HITs, definately look for these.

HINT: 
Search for the word "mouse" and HITs that pay at least $1.00

Note:
I've seen some chit-chat on the Reddit Board I mentioned that some people have had trouble with server speed and that there have been problems with the submit button. All the chat suggests that they take care of it quickly if you contact them.

Follow the bouncing mouse

I picked up a few HITs today where I had to look at a series of blurry pictures and move my mouse around to see the clear version of the images. I'm not sure what they were actually doing with this survey, but it paid pretty well for MTurk. I'll look for more of those another time.

The bird pictures I worked on the other day are gone. I wish I'd have stayed up later doing more of those.

I did a bunch of Eight penny HITs earlier where I had to do a search for a key phrase on various search engines and give a one sentence comment about the most relevant page. Not the greatest money, but a lot better than getting the same money for transcribing 25 seconds of audio.

None of today's HIT's are approved yet. I hope I chose good requesters.

I broke my personal ban on surveys

I found a site, actually a "sub reddit" called HITs worth turking for and decided to give it a try. When you find a hit there, you click on it and wait for the advertisement to finish. You'll end up on MTurk with HIT ready to accept. Take another look at the HIT to make sure it suits you and then accept it.

I hated surveys before because they are usually too long and there's no way of knowing just how many pages of questions you'll actually have to go through to complete the HIT.

Well, HITs worth turking for suggested some survey HITs and I tried them. They actually worked out Okay. Now I'll just have to see if / when I get paid for them.

I guess I should share that link: Reddit MTurk HITs

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!

Time to spend some money.

I like the fact that the pennies I earned at MTurk can easily be used to purchase on Amazon. I bought a new power adapter for my old Acer Laptop. It cost me nothing from my bank account because I had MTurk money sitting there waiting to be used.