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.

Work from home

It seems there are lots of ways a person might work from home these days. Some call centers have operators sitting at their own computers answering calls as if they were at the main office. There are medical transcription services and who knows how many other options there are. Too often they are pushed as get-rich-quick schemes or obviously over-promise. We all steer clear of those when we see them.

I'll say this for MTurk, it seems legitimate. I'm not saying that all requesters are, but the service itself from Amazon seems to be on the up-and-up. There are HITs that are fun to do and pay enough to make it partially worthwhile. There are HITs that are so under priced that it is beyond ridiculous. Some take the approach that they'll do those HITs while trying to build their reputation, but as long as there are millions of people trying to get started, then the payout on these HITs will never go up.

Because I was able to return to my regular job, I did not do a large number of HITs and I did not get many certifications or tests done. The computer I was using has a bad sound-card (list of excuses...) There might be more money to be made in some of the more detailed writing tasks and especially on the transcribing tasks (HITs), but it hasn't drawn me back in since January.

I'll be surprised if I have any new posts, but I'll leave my experiences here in case other potential MTurkers might gain some insight from my experience.

Seven days without a HIT

Well, I think that my experience is showing that the amount of pay at mTurk isn't enough to draw me in as long as I have my 40 hour job.

I never got to a point where I made even minimum wage. I did make $0.02 a HIT for some 15 to 30 second HITs once, but those hits aren't always available.

I'm not entirely giving up, but just giving a pretty DOWN critique for the experiences I've had so far.
I pointed out in my last blog entry that I did top the $20 mark, but it took me WAY too long to get there.

Time will tell if I'm drawn back in, and if I can find a way to make it worth my time.

I met a little personal benchmark

I finally topped $20 earned.

It took me just under a month to do it. I couldon't tell you how many hours. It's a lot more than I'd have liked, but FAR from full time.

Time will tell if I continue my mTurk experinece and continue to blog about it.

My 2cents - Human OCR

I did a few two penny hits yesterday to see what they were all about. They'd show a picture of a business card and I'd have to fill in form fields to match the person/company on the card. I did two that they used to test me, and they paid me for those. I then did two more, but they were identical. When the third one came up identical, I stopped because I thought something was broken. I got paid for the two I did, so I guess it was okay.

I might try some more, but they are kind of long for such a small payout.

Right now I'd love to see some more of Coman Petre's two penny HITs!