Skip to main content ↑ ↓
Topic: Need a little extra money? (long post warning) (Read 3677 times) previous topic - next topic

Need a little extra money? (long post warning)

I've sat on the knowledge of this for almost a week now.. for one, the system wasn't stocked too well at the beginning.. (now it is) and for another thing, I wanted to be sure it worked right as far as money transfers. Just got my first $25 posted to my bank account this morning, (and I've done a total of about $75 worth of work) so I figured I'd finally post this:

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

Amazon.com is beta-testing a new service where people can do work for them.. work that a computer program can't do, or can't do very well. The pay per HIT (work unit) is small, but you can do a lot of them in a short time once you get the hang of it. You can take payment either as Amazon.com gift certificates, or as a transfer to your bank account. (like I did)

There's no obligation or hours to it.. you can just sign up and start doing them whenever, stop whenever, and do as many or as few as you like. You can casually poke away at it, or you can tweak the hell out of your setup like I've been trying to do, and crank out a ton of them. I'm up to about 440 an hour with a 11.5% rejection rate.. which at 3 cents a HIT works out to around $11.62 an hour. Some people are claiming over 1000 an hour.. and I'm on my way to 500+ an hour now that I set up a gamepad to do it with.

At any rate, even if you're already employed, it's something you can peck away at for an hour or two a day. My aunt is planning to do just that, as is my fiance. I'm planning on at least four hours a day once things settle down a little bit around the house. If anyone's interested in it, I can post some suggestions and tweaks to speed things up significantly.

BTW, don't expect immediate results. HITs are not always immediately evaluated, although I have had some accepted/rejected almost as I've posted them, even at 4 AM. Even if your HITs are accepted, the money you've earned is not immediately posted to your Amazon.com account. (sometimes takes a day or two) After that, it takes a few days to post to your bank account if you do that kind of transfer. (which is normal.. when I did credit sales in Star Wars Galaxies, my PayPal transfers would not post for a couple days if I recall.. I think it's a thing with the bank) They say to expect up to 5 business days to transfer, but I got mine in 3-4 days including a holiday.

Gonna wrap this post up for now. Let me know if you have any questions.

Need a little extra money? (long post warning)

Reply #1 –
Oh, as a side note: The company that's been posting all these pictures for evaluation, A9.com, is also looking to hire drivers to take the pics.. they provide you with a SUV, a GPS, a digital camera, and travel expenses. I think there's some kind of system where the GPS tells the camera(s) to trigger at a location where it thinks a business should be. It's a sloppy system, but what the hell.. if you wanna get paid to drive around all day, you might wanna look into it. I think they said they wanted a 6 month commitment to it, though.

Need a little extra money? (long post warning)

Reply #2 –
Figured I'd post a little visual evidence.

First pic is from my bank statement. The date listed is an error on my bank's part. It SHOULD say 11/26/2005.. and it showed up around 1 AM. My fiance also deposited $35 at the same time I deposited $25, hence the double deposit.

Second pic is my transaction history with Amazon.com. You'll notice it only lists about $18 available. They still haven't credited everything I've made for the past couple days.

Third pic is a history of the work I've done. About $52 worth has been approved, and I have over 1200 HITs pending. About 11.5% of mine have been rejected, which is a decent amount. (they can reject a work unit if they feel it was done wrong.. keeps people from just spamming in answers to rack up the HITs to cheat the system)

BTW, that 99 that's pending for today's entry? I did that in 10 minutes, 35 seconds. :D

Need a little extra money? (long post warning)

Reply #3 –
Guess none of you need extra money for the holidays. :p

They're almost finished approving my work from the past two days.. I'm somewhere around $91 now. Didn't get much done today with getting the new computer and all.

Need a little extra money? (long post warning)

Reply #4 –
I think I will try it out later on today. Thanks for the linkage. :)
2005 Subaru WRX STi|daily driver

Need a little extra money? (long post warning)

Reply #5 –
Quote from: darkthunder
I think I will try it out later on today. Thanks for the linkage. :)


me too, just gotta find time now. that get paied to search thing turned out to be a bust. i only made a few dollars off that. this looks more profitiable.

Need a little extra money? (long post warning)

Reply #6 –
Just did my second transfer to my bank. $50 of $66 available got sent over. Should see it in my account in about 3-4 days.

It's profitable if you're fast. I didn't think I would be all that quick about it, but I'm averaging 100 every 10 minutes now. At a 12.5% rejection rate, (I'm currently at 11.6%) that's $15.75 an hour. Sure beats fixing toilets and cleaning stained motel rugs for $8 an hour. :p

(although I have to say that I did like my old job for the variation.. hardly ever did the same thing twice in a row.. so it didn't get repetitive like this does. This is like factory work)

If you're interested enough after you've tried it later, let me know and I'll give ya some tips on going faster.

Need a little extra money? (long post warning)

Reply #7 –
Thanks much for this i just got laid off :flip: GSI.
Hey at least this will bring something in.

Need a little extra money? (long post warning)

Reply #8 –
Today isn't the best day to be "turking".. the site was down for awhile completely, and now that it's back up again, they have a ton of those infernal "Confirm Music Artist" HITs and hardly any picture HITs. The picture HITs are easy.. you can set up a cheap gamepad or keyboard shortcuts to FLY through them.. but the music stuff involves typing. It's also 2 cents a HIT vs. 3. 3 cents a HIT adds up when you're able to do 500-600 of them an hour.

However, I'm sure they'll restock the site soon. They were at least good today about catching me up on pending HITs. Just about all of them have been processed, my rejection percentage went down significantly, and all my money has been credited to me except for maybe $4. Keep in mind it's still a service in beta, if you get frustrated with it. It *should* get better.

Need a little extra money? (long post warning)

Reply #9 –
Bird351, I just signed up for that...all I can get right now are music ones (bleh) and it's annoying that I can only do every third or fourth one because they keep getting assigned to other people.

Garrett H.
'94 F250 XLT- 4x4, 5 speed, 7.3 IDI Turbo Diesel, 4" intake, 4" exhaust, 5" turnout stacks, manual hubs, etc.
'87 Thunderbird Turbo Coupe
Engine, wheels, tires, etc!
Exhaust sound clip
Another clip

Need a little extra money? (long post warning)

Reply #10 –
My guess is that the pics won't be refreshed much until Monday morning.

Let other people deal with the music ones.. someone always does them eventually. If there's nothing but music ones, I just find something else to do elsewhere and come back later. I won't even bother with them. My fiance did a bunch of them, and her rejection rate shot up to around 15%.. so we've avoided them ever since.

Need a little extra money? (long post warning)

Reply #11 –
Do they tell you which ones are rejected? I would like to know so I can correct my mistakes. =/
2005 Subaru WRX STi|daily driver

Need a little extra money? (long post warning)

Reply #12 –
No, they don't tell you which are rejected. I kinda wish they did, but I think the reduction in my rejection rate means I'm figuring it out on my own.

I think if you can picture yourself as a person wanting to find the business you're picking pictures for, and pick the picture based on what you would most likely see, eventually you'll get a really good feel for what to pick.

I see some people on "turking" forums complaining about people who go really fast and crank out 500-1000 HITs an hour.. but really, once you have a feel for it, it does speed up a great deal. (and the tweaks help, too) They talk as if it's almost dishonest, like faster people must be cheating or less thorough or whatever.. but it's just experience and an optimized setup. (although I have to wonder about the people claiming over 2000 an hour.. that's a HIT every 1.8 seconds.. I wonder if they just hit None Of The Others repeatedly.. I think speeds like that trigger alerts with the Mturk staff, from what I've read)

If I had a monitor that could fit all 8 images on the same page at 100% size or bigger, (I have a script that tiles the images onto one screen, allows you to set sizes and zoom, set hotkeys, etc.) REALLY got good with my gamepad/hotkey setup, and built the  out of this new PC, I'd still probably not do too much better than 1000 an hour. I'm at a consistent 600 an hour now. (I time it with a stopwatch program) That size monitor would be hideously expensive.. since I'm on a 17" LCD now at 1280x1024 and only able to fit them all on one screen (with that script) using 50% zoom.. plus I'd need a hell of a video card to drive it.. a hell of a lot better than this on-board . Load times aren't much of a problem.. there's a way around them, too. (tabbed browsing w/ Firefox, and a utility called SwiftTabs that allows you to bind a key to tab-switch.. I then bound that key to the gamepad.. heh. Load 2-3 different HITs, do the first one, submit it, hotkey to the next tab, do that one, submit it, hotkey again, etc... one's always loading while you're doing the next one)

Meh.. don't mind me.. I'm just rambling.. really tired right now. But I think I just dropped a few of those tips in there somewhere. :p

Need a little extra money? (long post warning)

Reply #13 –
Thanks for this i should make around 4 dollars today and right now since im laid off this'll help a bit.

yeah i did around 250- 280 of the musics those are annoying as hell like previousily stated.

Need a little extra money? (long post warning)

Reply #14 –
Couple notes for today:

- There's a severe shortage of HITs today, and people are speculating it's because of people running "bots". (fully automated scripts) Don't get discouraged if you're unable to do much today. Amazon is going to have to address this sooner or later.. and today may force them to do it sooner. The natives are getting restless.

- I found out that, if you use the A9 search engine we're doing these pics for, and you use it enough times, you get a small discount on anything from Amazon. (only like 1.57%, but it's better than nothing) I'm using A9 as my new search engine just to try and get it. Might as well, since I'll be buying at least one thing from them with a gift certificate generated by "turking".