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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?

#91

Post by tombert »

chuckgreenman wrote: post #82
segmondy wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming is fun for programmers, we don't get charged to play with computers. :)

Programming is fun for 15 minutes out of each hour, the other 45 are pretty frustrating.

I think I know what you're getting at. Where I work, you could almost set your watch on the almost-once-per-minute frequency of someone yelling "fuck" or "shit" because they're annoyed at something in code (I'm no exception to this), but I think it's safe to say that the 45 minutes of frustration are worth it for the 15 minutes of "I'm the coolest person ever!".

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

#93

Post by pavel_lishin »

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…

> figure out if he can get more responsibilities and a raise

Not sure about other parents, but when we had our baby, I was less ready for additional responsibilities than at any other point in my life.

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

#95

Post by wsc981 »

dsr_ wrote: post #48
wsc981 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 USD per hour can be decent depending the location. Where I live in Thailand people on average make 7 USD per day.

Do the people in Thailand who make $7/day generally have reliable access to the Internet for 8 hours a day, with a cost for network access and smartphone under $8/day? And a ready source of loans to cover the initial purchase? And can they read English?

Yeah, internet in our remote village is quite excellent. I've worked from home with on mobile 4G internet, was good enough for video calling. And now have proper broadband in home of course.

English skills aren't great for most people, though if people really wanted to could learn for free using apps like Duolingo (there's English lessons for Thai people).

A lot of people have decent smartphones. Good 4G internet for a month cost me around 600 Baht per month (~15 USD). Sure could be expensive if people make 300 Baht a day, but if they could work through Mechanical Turk, they could quickly earn back the cost, since they would likely earn more compared to working on a farm.

Thai people like to lend money a lot. They're the most indebted of SEA when looking at loans compared to their incomes [0]. The use these loans to buy new cars, houses and phones as well.

---

[0]: https://www.chiangmaicitylife.com/citylife-articles/drowning...

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

#96

Post by anewguy9000 »

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’d literally be sitting around bored half the day without it" lol

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

#97

Post by anm89 »

What would the argument be that some workers in the economy but not these people specifically deserve a minimum wage? I get that they are designated contractors but it seems pretty arbitrary. People would lose their minds if they found out Amazon was paying warehouse workers $2.50 an hour but couldn't they just arbitrarily assign prices per package and call them contractors as well?

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

#98

Post by sct202 »

I tried mTurk after reading an article like this years ago, and it was the biggest waste of time ever. It was ungodly tedious for like pennies per task. I don't know how anyone could be doing so well at getting tasks that average out to $0.47 ($45k/95k tasks) like this guy is claiming; this is an absurd outlier.

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

#99

Post by tpkj »

Traster wrote: post #68
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? Fo…

Bingo.

"Yo dawg, I heard you're thinking of a new way to make money...so I wrote a book about thinking of a new way to make money so you can think about a new way to make money while I make money from you thinking about my new way to think about making money."

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

#100

Post by neilv »

A few years ago, a friend of mine, in her 20s, worked full-time as a technician in a university-affiliated research lab, she managed to find a steal of a studio apartment (half the price of a bottom-end one-bedroom in the neighborhood), and she bought awful cheap bulk food... but money was still so tight that, in the evening, when she was too tired to do anything else, she did these online "gigs" that paid only $1-$2 an hour.

Since she could write, she mostly did writing assignments (which I suspected were for SEO Web sites), in which they tell you a topic and how many words to write, you research and write the article, and you get paid a pittance. But $2 will buy steel-cut oats for the day.

Her time should've been worth more than $1-$2/hour, and I don't like the idea of companies arguably exploiting desperate people this way. Though it's not just companies: university researchers sometimes use Mechanical Turk workers to process data, and as research subjects.

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