Getting Paid For Your Work on Amazon Mechanical Turk

If you’re looking to make money on line and you’re curious about Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk), my first piece of advice is....find a better way to make money. Okay, for all you Mturkers out there, I don’t want to offend you, but there’s got to be a better way to make money -- either online or in the real world. If you’ve worked for Mturk for any amount of time, you already know of the deplorably low wages.

Okay, that’s out of the way. You, like me, have decided to spend time at the modern online version of a sweatshop and you’re wondering how it works and, more importantly, how you get paid.

Well, getting paid on Mturk is a mixed bag. The two factors I will discuss are how you get paid and how quickly you get paid. I will avoid the discussion of how much (or little) the wages are.

As far as how, you have two options. Option one is that you can choose to link your Amazon payments to a checking account. This is a fairly painless procedure -- just follow the links to your account, follow the instructions, and enter your account information. Just a note, though; this does take some time to process. Amazon will test your account by sending one or two small deposits to your account and you have to confirm that you have received them.

Option two is using your hard won earnings Mturk to buy merchandise on Amazon’s incredibly large and diverse store. It’s easy to start using your money to buy merchandise. Just go to your account settings and then look for a link under “Your Earnings” then look for the link that talks about transferring your money to your bank account or to use on Amazon. Easy as pie you will be taken to your Amazon Payments page where you need to log-in and then chose how you want to spend your money.

When considering timing, you have to know that some Requesters are notoriously slow in play and there’s not a lot you can do about it. If you get terribly impatient, then you can elect to write to them and see what’s up. Writing Amazon staff doesn’t do a lot of good. I currently have one Requester who hasn’t approved one of my HITs I completed from 15 days ago. And this is for a lousy $.50 cents.

I have used both methods of payment. I have transferred money to my bank account and I have purchased merchandise off Amazon with my hard-won earnings. I recently wanted a new MP3 player and started putting in my time in the virtual salt mines. Three weeks later I had the money and pulled the trigger when Amazon dropped the price on my coveted item.