The Blog of Xangis

For those of you who are excited by data entry, Amazon Mechanical Turk is an interesting site.

The premise is pretty simple — people (”requesters”) post “human interface tasks” (HITs), typically repetitive and mind-numbing, and workers will perform them, usually earning one or two cents per task completed. Some tasks are more involved and pay better, but most are in the $.01 to $.06 range.

Having spent a few weeks doing random tasks on Mechanical Turk, I’ve found that it makes no sense whatsoever to even THINK about trying to making a living using the Turk. Income rates range from $0.40 to $1.50 per hour depending on what tasks are available, so unless you’re living in a third- or fourth-world country, you’re not going to earn enough to make it worth your time.

However, if you’re bored and have nothing better to do, it’s more productive than just sitting around eating cheeseburgers. A few dollars a week isn’t much, but if you work really hard you might just be able to pay your monthly internet bill. So you can work longer, so you can earn more, so you can do more HITs. (Sorry, 1980’s TV commercial flashback.)

A better use for Mechanical Turk is coming up with the tasks that others will do. If you’re looking to cut costs for some of the repetitive tasks that nobody in your company wants to do, you can post them on Mechanical Turk and let someone in Tuvalu or Burundi earn a nice living.

In addition to letting you create tasks from the Mechanical Turk website, Amazon has a web services API that will let you automatically submit tasks. If you have a website that is gathering data from visitors that needs some sort of manual processing, then it would be well worth your time to look into the Mturk API (or hire a programmer to look into it for you.)

For web developers, typical uses of the Mechanical Turk site might include paying users to post on a new forum in order to build traffic, write articles and reviews for your website, or take surveys to help you perform market research — the possibilities are nearly endless.