Sunday, June 22, 2008

Internet Program: Amazon's Mechanical Turk (this is a weird one, folks...)

So imagine a freelance site where you can make anywhere from $.01 (yes, one penny) to $8 for anywhere from 3 seconds of work to about an hour.

Amazon Mechanical Turk does this. Register using an existing Amazon.com account. Sign up for Amazon Payments (they walk you through it). And then go to Amazon Mechanical Turk and find, oh, 15,000 possible "freelance" jobs. Labeled "Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs, these are bite-sized jobs that you do, and you earn real money doing them.

I've earned ONE ENTIRE PENNY using their system, have another THIRTY CENTS waiting to be approved, and will earn another $.50 shortly! Woo hoo!

You won't get rich doing this. Really. But you can convert the pocket change into Amazon.com gift certificates. You can find something fun to do in between reading about Jamie Lynn Spears and Yahoo's demise.

:)

3 comments:

Dani In NC said...

I do MTurk off and on. I used to get frustrated until I figured out that the best thing to do is to jump on the super-easy HITs when they show up and power through as many as I can until I'm sick of them. Some HITs just take way too long to do in relation to the fee being offered.

MBZ said...

I agree--I made about $1.88 today in 20 minutes or so (so about $5.64/hour) doing 4-cent questions for Amazon.com itself.

Boredom became the issue--not supply or money :)

Lisa Russell said...

Hmmm- it looks shady to me, I'm afraid to give them my amazon info, like they'll hack into my affiliate sales revenue or something