Sassy Black Friend

Work at Home Jobs Experiment – Amazon Mechanical Turk

I started with this one for two reasons. First, I love me some Amazon.com (plus I trust them), and I didn’t understand what the hell this was about until I looked into it for a while.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk allows you to… er… help companies do things that don’t take a lot of time, and get paid a little bit for it. That’s as specific as I can be, but here’s an article from CNET that covers it a lot better.

I was able to sign up using my existing Amazon account, but had to confirm my email address to sign up for whatever allows them to pay me. That took 5 minutes. Then, I took a look at the tasks, or “HITs” to perform. I selected the first 5 that seemed easy, quick, and remotely interesting. Here’s a sample of what I did:

Picture classification task
I looked at 11 photos of product packaging and identified whether the provided word was or was not the brand name of the product. Like a really easy quiz, so that was fun. It took about 5 minutes (2 of which was spent going through the examples, like that was necessary), and the payment is $0.35.

Three sentence variations
This was a real bastard, to be honest. They provided a list of different phrases (related to medicine), and I had to enter three variations of each statement. So, if the phrase was “I love to eat cookies” you could say “I enjoy eating cookies a lot” and so on. The goal is to rephrase without changing meaning. I honestly cant’ imagine how this is useful, but it took 20 minutes and I made $0.80 for it. Ugh.

Rewrite website description
This task sent me to an ad for a website, with a request to rewrite the current description, or add my own. The one I got was incomprehensible, so I spent about 10 minutes looking at the site in the ad, and writing a short description of it, for $0.30. The site was about haircuts, so it was at least kind of useful. Turns out my weird bob is in style right now.

Three hours after completing these only 2 have been approved, so I’m going to wait until more are to do anymore. The site is pretty neat, it shows updated stats, and there seem to be thousands of available tasks. But, as you can see, they’re not exactly earning you a lot of money. Right now the highest cost available is $7.50 for what seems to be hours of work.

Up next, MyLot paid message board posting…