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How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

thehustle.co

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Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#61

Post by codetrotter »

mruts wrote: post #53
Ma8ee wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but someone who calls himself a BA should be able to get better return for his time.

He probably can but MTurk is superior because of liquidity and flexibility. There are very few jobs in which value is created and paid for in a span of a minute. By turning dead time into money, generating money in a way you could not for other jobs. And a BA isn’t worth much regardless. Half the people I knew in college now work at coffee shops. A general good rule is what when you see someone do something, there’s…

> And a BA isn’t worth much regardless. Half the people I knew in college now work at coffee shops.

I agree with everything you said but just wanted to point out that in the comment you responded to, “BA” means “Business Analyst”, whereas in the sentence you wrote that I quoted it seems that you took “BA” to mean “Bachelor of Arts”.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#62

Post by mikehollinger »

dgivney wrote: post #43

A somewhat interesting article which strongly turns into a puff piece of MT. I started scrolling to the bottom to find out who was paying for this content and there it was "In his book, Side Hustle From Home: How To Make Money Online With Amazon Mechanical Turk".. I wonder just how does he manage a new baby, a side hustle that fills every minute with productive money-making and writing a book!.. The author really sho…

Yeah I noticed as well. It seems like what this is really saying is that the Mechanical Turk marketplace is an interesting study in economics. Buyers are offering to buy pieces of information for too high of a price and a select few people have found out how to nab those contracts.

I halfway expected to see a secondary market emerge where you “complete” a top expensive task like “translate this text” by bundling it with five other translation tasks and posting it for three times the price.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#63

Post by meddlepal »

ForHackernews wrote: post #47
Thorrez wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Despite an uptick in foreign users over the past few years, the majority of them (75%) are based in the US.

America is becoming like Brazil: a third world nation with some wealthy enclaves.

Except it's not. Most Americans enjoy a very high standard of living and our poor are still much better off still than Brazilian poor.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#64

Post by ashelmire »

stubish wrote: post #50
blintz wrote: post #42

How do people feel about the research ethics of this? Many academic studies involve the use of MTurk participants, but it seems as though they are not being paid close to a living or even fair wage ($2 an hour is abysmal!). Should universities require that studies using MTurk pay some minimum pro-rated hourly wage? That is, if a Stanford HCI study (which seem to use MTurk often) wants workers to fill out a 15-minute…

I wonder if they actually get meaningful results from MTurk participants; you are getting a very skewed and unnatural demographic, and I don't see how any results based on feedback from MTurk participants can be applied to any normal population. Much more so than the traditional study group of students-who-need-to-pay-rent. I don't see an ethical problem in how much you pay participants (after all, how much it pays o…

I know that we use MTurk at the Linguistic Data Consortium (and that others in NLP use it as well). I know that those involved with it put in a lot of work to make sure we get good, useful data - there are many papers and strategies on the subject of crowdsourcing.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#65

Post by ashelmire »

gitgud wrote: post #4

I want to know who is paying $0.01 USD to get someone to manually transrcibe a reciept to a table. It seems the Mechanical Turk ecconomy could be dwindling due to the accessiblity of AI these days.

The whole point of MTurk is to get data you will use to train your models. Using some artificial means to make money on MTurk would be circular, and probably easily spotted - if not, your model has effectively solved the problem domain anyway!

We do language related things on MTurk (crowdsourced translation, for example). It's very easy to spot those who have used something like google translate or other artificial means - it's quite rare for a sentence to be translated exactly the same way twice, for starters.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#66

Post by fouc »

brighter2morrow wrote: post #55
londons_explore wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some MTurk tasks are amenable to sub-contracting out or writing bots to mostly or fully automate. If he does that, I could see it being competitive on an hourly basis to a regular job.

As someone who regularly purchases work from MTurk, some rando's crumby bot is absolutely not what I'm looking for. We're training our own AI from MTurk responses, and we're sending to MTurk difficult edgecases that our own AI gets wrong.

It's AI turtles all the way down.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#67

Post by mruts »

ForHackernews wrote: post #47
Thorrez wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Despite an uptick in foreign users over the past few years, the majority of them (75%) are based in the US.

America is becoming like Brazil: a third world nation with some wealthy enclaves.

As a person who actually lives in a 3rd world country and grew up in America, what you’re saying could not be more false. Even the poorest Americans live a life here that would be considered one of great luxury. We’re talking about living on a dirt floor in collapsing mud houses. We’re talking about babies dying from dirty water as a regular occurrence. No running water, intermittent electricity and definitely no sewage. Most people here haven’t eaten meat in months, occasionally years.

If you actually think America is a 3rd world country you need to get out more.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#68

Post by Traster »

dgivney wrote: post #43

A somewhat interesting article which strongly turns into a puff piece of MT. I started scrolling to the bottom to find out who was paying for this content and there it was "In his book, Side Hustle From Home: How To Make Money Online With Amazon Mechanical Turk".. I wonder just how does he manage a new baby, a side hustle that fills every minute with productive money-making and writing a book!.. The author really sho…

This seems like an almost constant feature of ways to make money online - the people who are making the money are almost uniformly making money by selling tutorials on how to make money online.

Want to make money online playing poker? Pay $800 for Upswing Poker's masterclass!

Want to make money online trading stocks? Check out the ultimate Penny Stock Playbook for only $50!

Want to make money online drop shipping? For only $1600 you can buy the ProfitableOnlineStore course and have all your questions answered!

So it makes you wonder doesn't it: If people are so good at making millions making money online, why are they offering to sell you the secret rather than actually making the millions themselves. The answer is: It's easier to sell gullible people tutorials than it is to actually make a living exploiting arbitrage opportunities in one of the most efficient markets ever known to man.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#69

Post by cies »

oflordal wrote: post #29
ptero wrote: post #19

The person described is a "senior business analyst", reportedly making good money, but decides to work on MTurk, doing menial tasks, to help offset extra costs (diapers, etc.) of a baby that was born. This sounds insane to me. Almost anything else sounds better: reduce expenses, figure out if he can get more responsibilities and a raise, even get a low % credit to pay for those diapers for a year, etc. . Is this just…

If you think it is fun, having a hobby (mturk) that is a small net positive can save you a lot of money compared to having a hobby which is a net loss (most hobbies).

> If you think it is fun [...] (mturk)

If this was generally perceived as fun, then Amazon would charge money for you to "play" mturk. The fact mturk work pays tells me that mturk is pretty much nobody's hobby.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#70

Post by [deleted] »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #46
ptero wrote: post #19

The person described is a "senior business analyst", reportedly making good money, but decides to work on MTurk, doing menial tasks, to help offset extra costs (diapers, etc.) of a baby that was born. This sounds insane to me. Almost anything else sounds better: reduce expenses, figure out if he can get more responsibilities and a raise, even get a low % credit to pay for those diapers for a year, etc. . Is this just…

I guess the article doesn't say it well, but this can be done in small scraps of time from wherever you currently are under circumstances where making money with a "regular job" would not be possible. If you make, say, an extra $5/day on what used to be your smoke breaks and lunch hour at work for an 8-5 job, you have an extra $180 or so a month without any additional overhead (for uniforms, whatever), scheduling con…

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