**** Whitman said:
Have you taken a look at that Amazon Mechanical Turk? I think that the pay is awful for pretty menial tasks - mostly it seems like people trying to artificially pump up their Web hits - but over time you might be able to accumulate a little money. I tried it one day just for kicks and earned like 10 cents, so it's legit, but I bet you have to kind of fiddle with it and figure out how to maximize your time to actually make it worthwhile (some of the vendors do seem like scams).
Necrobump!
I stumbled across Mechanical Turk this week and have been doing it for a few days. It's a lot of fun, but I do *not* recommend it for anyone looking for a real work-from-home job.
The negatives:
1) The pay is completely terrible. I did the math, and at my absolute best I can make about $4/hour on the site, and practically most people will make a lot less.
2) There are some horror stories out there about people randomly running afoul of the Amazon.com Terms of Service, and if they close your account for TOS reasons, any money you haven't cashed out, they keep. This isn't like real freelance work where you have some labor law recourse. It *seems* as if most of those people actually were trying to cheat (i.e. by having computers do the work for them or having multiple accounts or fake identities), but that still rubs me the wrong way.
So why have I been enjoying it? I realized today that it's hitting the same part of my brain as a good video game. You do some simple tasks over and over and your score goes up. Only in this case, your score is measured in dollars.
Essentially, you sign up for the site, and there are thousands of small tasks people need performed, with small prices attached. Once you are approved on the site, you can begin doing those tasks. You submit the work, and wait for the requester to approve your work (takes between minutes and 30 days, with about half done inside a day). The requester has a lot of leeway to reject you for any reason, but so far I've had no problems. After you've been doing it for 10 days, you can have whatever amount you've accumulated direct deposited to your bank account any time you want.
Most of the money I've made has come from transcription jobs. There are a few companies out there that offer transcription services for something like $1/minute of audio. Then they the file into 3-5 minute chunks and pay Mechanical Turk workers a fraction what they charged in order to do the actual work. They demand perfect accuracy and devotion to house style. Obviously, a reporting background is good practice for this.
The best-paying transcription jobs are verbatim transcripts of insurance claim phone calls. You have to pass a test to do these, and they expect every small stutter and "um" to be in the transcript. I've also done church services, an interview with a firefighter who survived 9/11 and a Chicago Buddhist conference session.
There are a decent number of writing jobs, and those are some of the best paying on the site, but I've stayed away from those. The pay is completely awful by real-world standards, and any professional should just do real freelance work if they want to do extra writing. I did make $1.50 for writing a 200-word description of a neighborhood in San Francisco to use with real estate ads.
The video-game mentality comes into play in that I've found myself doing stuff for almost no pay at all, just because I want to see my statistics go up or my "score" improve. Some of the stuff I've done and for some reason enjoyed doing:
1) A few surveys for academic studies (not bad pay, ranging from 50 cents to $3)
2) Entered the data off of business cards at .02 per card (takes about 30 seconds each).
3) Google searched given terms and entered where a given web site showed up in the search rankings (about 3 cents per term)
4) Judged the performance of automated answering services on phone calls with human inquiries. (7 cents per call)
5) Written 90-character descriptions of porn videos based on a series of still photos. (9 cents each, but I would have done that one for free)
6) Confirmed whether snippets of text from what appeared to be data sniffers referred to a company or not (I.e. did the sentence refer to farmers or Farmers Insurance)? $.05 per batch of 10.
I'm sure I'll get bored with it in a week or so, but I'll report back to mention if I ever see any of the $40 I've made so far.
