Is Amazon Mechanical Turk Worth It? or a Waste of Time?

Whenever people ask how to make money online, one of the go-to answers was to sign-up to Amazon Mechanical Turk. But is Amazon Mechanical Turk worth it? Can you use it to earn reliable income? I decided to take a look at the old platform to see how it's holding up. 

Is Amazon Mechanical Turk Worth It? 

If you're looking to earn some pocket change, Amazon Mechanical Turk is worth it. There are lots of tasks available and the minimum payout is one dollar. It's a legitimate and safe platform operated by Amazon. 

The downside is it's an invite-only platform and it's currently overrun with workers. To improve your chances of being accepted, you need to be from either the U.S, Canada, or UK. While the platform does support over 44 countries, it can take a while to receive an invite. 

Making Money with MTurk 

According to a study in 2018, the average new Amazon Mechanical Turk worker earns $2 an hour, with 4% of members earning more than $7.25 an hour. Earnings vary drastically depending on your country, profile rating, and available tasks. It looks similar to data that you find in most multi-level marketing income disclosure statements. 

Cashing Out: 

The good news is you can withdraw money from Mechanical Turk as soon as you earn a dollar or more. Currently MTurk only supports direct deposit transfers or Amazon gift cards. There's also a one-time 10-day withdrawal period on new accounts.

The downside is Amazon can only do direct deposit transfers to bank accounts in certain countries and in USD. If you're in the U.S, the best option would be direct deposit. International workers will have to either use a third-party payment platform such as HyperWallet or Payoneer, or resort to Amazon gift cards. 

Which Countries Work with MTurk? 

MTurk is available in 49 countries. The majority of members are in the U.S. Most countries can access the website but you'll be placed on a waiting list and won't be able to complete any work until you're approved. There's no estimated time on when you will be approved or if you ever will. 

How Amazon Mechanical Turk it Works: 

Back in the day, Amazon's Mechanical Turk was constantly recommended as an easy way to earn income online. Today? Not so much. Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk for short) is Amazon's micro-task platform. There are two sides to the platform; Requesters and Workers. The Requesters create the tasks, and the workers complete them for rewards. 

Tasks on the platform are called HITs and there are HITs for almost every kind of work, including surveys. HIT stands for "Human Intelligence Task". Most of the tasks are user-generated. If you're accepted to Amazon Mechanical Turk, there's lots of work to complete. The downside is most tasks only pay a few cents.

As you progress and earn a high approval rate, high-paying tasks are unlocked. While most tasks are easy to complete (some only take a few minutes) they pay is equally as low. Nevertheless, let's take a look at some of the HIT groups to get an idea. 

Types of HITS: 

Here's a screenshot of my work feed: 

As you can see, most of these tasks don't pay much. The highest one pays $0.20 and you need to qualify for it. The good news is they're fairly simple.

For example, the "Collect email for channel" HIT requires you to visit a social media page and look for an email address, the profiles are provided. It shouldn't take longer than a minute. 

If you sort by highest rewards, there are some good offers. The downside is these offers usually require a variety of specific qualifications from the platform, and they're very exclusive too.

Look: 

I sorted the HITs by highest reward and expanded the top three results. The first one is a Compensation HIT by SurveyComet. These are HITs designed from third-party platforms as a way to pay workers for completed work.

These can only be accepted by the person who did the work on the other platform. It's kind of like a payment gateway, and lots of survey platforms use MTurks HITs to handle payments. 

The other HITs require specific qualifications. For instance, the Healthcare Statement task requires Employment Industry in Healthcare and 5000 minimum approved HITs. The pay is $15 and there are 304 multiple choice questions. That's a lot of questions! 

The pay is really not that good but there's lots of work to do. I wouldn't recommend investing a lot of your time into Amazon Mechanical Turk because the pay for workers is very low. 

However, MTurk does have other uses...

Using MTurk Workers: 

If you're trying to grow an online business, you'll soon realize there are lots of trivial tasks to work on. Requesters can use MTurk crowd-sourcing features to hire lots of people to complete small tasks at the same time. In other words, it's a cheap way to find lots of virtual assistants.

Take a look at some of the Requester HIT templates:  

There are templates for data-collection, transcription, translation, website collection, search relevance, and many others. One of the most popular tasks on MTurk is to find email addresses. Essentially what's happening is your paying cents for people to find you leads. Interesting! 

Other Related Platforms:

• Survey Junkie
• Survey Time
• GG2U
• PaidViewPoint
• Yandex Toloka

The Bottom Line: 

Overall, Amazon's Mechanical Turk is an interesting platform and there is potential to make some income as a worker. Besides having to wait to be invited, the tasks don't pay much at all. It also works best if you're in the U.S because international users will run into a lot of roadblocks. 

In my opinion, the best thing about MTurk is the crowd-sourcing function as a Requester, not a Worker. With a little creativity, you can automate tasks that can benefit your business, such as helping find you leads, and whatnot.

Are you looking to make money online and not sure where to start? How does earning passive income from a website sound? Building a profitable website is not that hard. It just takes time. Luckily for you, there's a course that walks you through the entire process. It's called Wealthy Affiliate, and you can create an account for free. 

Hopefully now you know whether or not Amazon Mechanical Turk is worth it.

Have you tried it? Drop a comment below!