Taking HITs: The Low-Paying/High Volume Strategy

Making money online with Amazon Mechanical Turk can be a time consuming drone -- especially on the low value HITs. The work can be grueling and tedious at times. Some workers like to take on a smaller amount of higher paying HITs while others like to have a mass harvest of a long series of the same type low-paying HIT. I like to call this strategy the Low-Paying/High Volume Strategy.

This strategy basically consists of finding a repetitive HIT that has a large number to pull from, learning what it takes to complete them, and then putting your head down and churning them out.

I’ve done this before. In about 90 minutes one day, I completed about 120 HITs and was $1.20 richer for it. Woo-woo But that’s not really my cup of tea, though.

This article will focus on that strategy. For some people, they really don’t look at Mturk as a place they want to put on their thinking cap. They need or want to earn a few extra bucks and don’t really want to have to work up a mental sweat.

Knocking down a long series of low-paying, uncomplicated HITs can be relaxing or so does one Mturker report. He said:

“For the most part, I like simple, plain, straightforward tasks. The repetition relaxes me, in a sense, but at the same time drives me to see how many I can do before they run out.”

This strategy might work for someone who has sedentary job in which they might have to monitor something on a computer or watch an area like a night watchman. It’s sort of like double-dipping because you’re making a wage from your job and also making money on Mturk.

There are some downsides to this approach. First, if you have a requester who rejects your long series of HITs, your rejection rate is going to skyrocket. Also, if you mistakenly get something fundamentally wrong with the HIT, you’re setting yourself up for a whole slew of rejections.

The other downside are slow payers. For the Mturker who likes this strategy of low-paying/high volume working, slow payers can be quite frustrating.

Anyway, for quite a few workers, this strategy is the only way to go. Set up the cheap HITs and they will knock them down.