Maximizing Earnings Per HIT

As I’ve said many times before working for Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) is not an easiest way to make money online. In fact, it’s slow and tedious. And if you’ve read any of my past posts, you read between the line (or maybe I’m more obvious than I think), but I’m not a big fan of the low-paying/high volume strategy.

I was reading some posts on the Turker Nation forum where some Mturk providers discussed their average reward per HIT. Here’s some excepts from the forum:

“My income per HIT: $0.270.”

“$4595.53 / 40550 = 0.113”

“183.16/796 HITS = .23 per HIT”

“$3,604.75 / 243,920 = 0.014”

On another post, I read of a poster who advocated a low-paying/high volume strategy. This poster like doing a horde of low-cost/low-thought HITs. Here’s an except from his post:
“All told, in the span of almost a year, I've done about 25k hits and made about $530. I try when possible to do the 3, 5, 10 cent hits (to me, those are "big money"), but the one centers are my bread and butter -- literally!”

My operating philosophy for Mturk is diametrically opposite to this poster. I take almost exclusively writing HITs and I like maximizing my earnings. To illustrate my point here are my numbers from the past 30 days:
Past 30 days -- 216 HITs = $348 -- Average per HIT: $1.61

Now, I certainly can’t quantify my time spent compared to this poster’s time spent, but I can point out that I made nearly 2/3’s of what this poster made in one year in only one month of work. I have averaged around two hours a day working on Mturk and made over $10/day. I don’t know who has the more tedious job, but I can say that I learn something from my work on Mturk -- along with making money.

HITs to Avoid on Amazon Mechanical Turk

The world is hard enough making money online and with the low wages on Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) it’s even more difficult. To add insult to injury, there is a small contingent of requesters that want to exploit the workers of Mturk in the worst possible sense of the word.

But how do you know who to work for and who to avoid? Well, below are simple guidelines to follow.

You should avoid HITS that involve:

• Secret shopping
• Testing a website that requires that you enter personal information
• Testing software - I recommend you avoid any HIT that asks you to download and test software. The risk is too high (you don’t know what you’re getting) and the reward is to low.
• Free trials that ask you to sign up for a service
• Surveys that request you input personal information (Although request from academic sources and have a human subjects disclaimer are usually good to go.)

The above HIT examples to avoid are usually ones posted by scammers. There is a big risk that you will be opening yourself to any number of problems, plus you very well might not get paid at all for taking on this risk.

If you want you can review my two previous articles on Turker Nation, a forum for Mturk workers, and Turkopticon, an online database with reviews of requesters by Mturk workers.

In many cases, these types of bad HITs should not be on Mturk at all since they violate Amazon Mechanical Turk’s Terms of Service, but review is lax and enforcement is almost non-existent. My recommendation is that you should avoid any or all of these. The risk/reward ratio is just too skewed to the risk side.

Getting Back at 95% Approved with Amazon Mechanical Turk

Making money online is hard enough without being judged. And on Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) the judgement can be harsh. With each HIT you take on, you are placing yourself out there to be rejected. Now, some people may say, “Hey, it’s only a $.02 cent job. I can take a rejection on that, no big deal.”

Well, as I said in an earlier post, going below the 95% approved threshold can have a dramatic effect on ability to access HITs. So, it’s not the monetary quality of the HITs that matter - a $.02 cent rejection carries the weight of a $2.00 rejection. It’s the cumulative effect that can kill you. Once you drop below 95%, your already difficult job becomes even harder.

In my earlier post, I discussed my own tragedy with dipping below 95%. I took on a long series of low earning HITs and all the while I was doing them this little buzzer was going off in the back my head. The HIT was poorly constructed and while I did the best I could, I got hit with around 30 rejections, dropping my acceptance rate down to around 91%.

Because I don’t use a strategy of taking on a slew of low earnings HITs, it took forever for me to get my approved rate back above 95%. At the point of my downfall, I had done in the order of 600-700 HITs. So, to get myself back meant taking on a boatload of HITs to off-set the negative impact of those 30 rejections.

Well, that day finally came. I decided to use the percentages in my favor and found a one cent HIT that I could produce in a relatively quick fashion and an hour and 121 HITs later, I had my approval rating back at 95%.

Woo-woo. Now, did it really change Mturking for me? Not by much, really. Since my work on Mturk doesn’t involve the low paying/high volume strategy that I discussed in an earlier article, I was able to get by on an approval rating of less than 95%, but I have noticed quite a few more available HITs since making back to 95%.

So, if you find your approval rate trashed by a bunch of rejections, bide your time and find some low earning HITs you can plow your way through and you’ll back at 95% in no time.

Writing for Dollars on Amazon Mechanical Turk

When it comes to making money online with Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) there are definitely different strategies and philosophy for making money. In an earlier post I talked about a low impact strategy of taking on low reward HITs in high volume. In this post, I will flip this strategy on end and discuss high reward/low volume strategy with a focus on writing.

Two Criteria
The first two criteria for taking on writing HITs on Mturk are:
One - you should be able to write. That doesn’t mean writing Pulitzer quality material, but you can string a few sentences together and make sense
Two - you have to want to write. If you want to work for this low of wage, you should at least enjoy it.

To SEO or Not to SEO
There are a multitude of writing HITs on Mturk. Many are ones that you require you to write SEO (search engine optimization) targeted material. You’re basically given a topic and have to include a phrase about that topic two or three times in the article. These articles usually have to be between 350 and 600 works, but sometimes requesters want 1200 words. Rewards vary on these and sometimes you can make $3.00 on these HITs.

There are also HITs that aren’t SEO related. These work pretty much the same as the SEO articles, but aren’t as stringent in the phrasing of phrases and words.

General Writing Assignments
I tend to prefer general writing assignments. If I can get into a groove, I can knock out three and sometimes four articles in an hour with average pay between $1.70 and $1.90 per article. If I do hit that sweet spot, I’m making over $5.00/hour.

In the past month alone I made over $300 taking on writing assignments in my spare time. And I mean my spare time. I usually write an hour in the morning before work, then over my lunch hour and maybe do a couple in the evening. If I can get six completed in a day, I can average $10 a day and that gets me to $300 a month.

Speed is the key to making this work. You have to be able research and write quickly.

Research
If you get bogged down in the research, you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot. I basically do a quick Google search of the topic and then find a primary source to work from. That source needs to substantive. If there’s only a couple sentences you’re going to run into trouble stretching the story to the required word length.

Conversely, if you have too much source material or the material is dense and complicated, you can lose efficiency. I’ve abandoned many HITs because the topic was just too complicated to summarise quickly.

Writing
Once you’re ready to write you need to get the words down quickly. Don’t spend a lot of time looking for the right word. Remember you’re not being paid enough to win an award, just to get the facts down in a logical and readable fashion.

Plagiarism Protection
Do not plagiarize material. Do not cut and paste from your source. Most requesters run the writing assignments through plagiarism checkers and your work will be rejected. Even worse, you will run the risk of being banned from taking anymore HITs from that requester. Take a few moments to run what you’ve done through a plagiarism checker before you even submit it.

I’ve used a plagiarism checker in the past and have caught some of my original writing that was too close to an already existing source. When this happens I have had to just do some small re-writes to make sure my work doesn’t seem too much like something else that is already out there.

My favorite plagiarism checker right now can be found at dustball.com.

Final Proof
If the article is short, I recommend that you give it one last proofing before you hit the submit button on the HIT. I’ve caught more than fair share of mistakes in my writing that just needed small tweaks.

Writing my not be your thing, but it works for me and I think that if you compare it with the low-reward/high volume strategy, writing will be pay better dividends.

With Amazon Mechanical Turk, Avoid Rejection - At All Costs

Rejection in real life, be it for a job or asking for a date, can be painful, but rejection in the world of Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) can have some serious effects to your earning potential. That is if you’re serious about working for Mturk for the long haul and trying to make some money online.

If you working on Mturk for any amount of time you’re likely to encounter a HIT that makes you think twice. It could be badly worded such as including contradictory instructions or be poorly worded. This should be your red flags to steer clear.

You see, your earning potential on Amazon Mechanical Turk is tied to your Acceptance rate. It’s really better correlates to your Rejection rate. To be able to access the greatest amount of HITS on Mturk, you need to have a high acceptance rate. If you drop below 95%, you will see a dramatic decrease in the amount of HITS available to you.

It turns out Requesters do have standards after all. They don’t want just anyone working on their HITs.

My example of this is a sad one because it happened to me. Early in my Mturjk days, I found a quick and easy series of HITs and while they didn’t pay a lot, I could plow through them at a speedy rate. I read the instructions and while I felt there were some contradictions in them, I proceeded anyway.

Big mistake.

The HIT did have contradictory instructions. I was categorizing some-such thing and they wanted the worker to select a categorization in an “either/or” fashion, but they didn’t design the question criteria in the correct way. It was sort of like asking a question about a flower and saying it is either red or blue --- or green or white, but it can’t be both, but you have to provide answers to both. So, with each subsequent question, I was building a slew of contradictory responses...and rejections.

My acceptance rate dropped below 95% and I saw a precipitous drop in the number of HITs available to me once I dropped below that 95% line. It takes doing a lot of HITs over a lot of time to move that needle back up above 95 depending on how far you’ve dropped down. It’s sort of like tanking your first term in college with a C, 2 Ds and an F. It’s going to take moving a mountain for a long time to get get that old GPA back up into a range where your parents will send you beer money again. If ever.

My advice is that you carefully read all instruction for a HIT. If you come across a red flag, read them again, this time very carefully.

I’ve taken a very conservative approach to low-pay, mass-issued HITS. I only do a couple and then submit them. Then I wait to see if they are accepted or rejected.

If I lose out on some HITs, I guess it’s worth the risk avoidance. That's just my humble opinion, though, but enter iffy HITs with caution.

Getting Help Evaluating HITs and Requesters

Turker Nation Forums

You’re ready to make money online with Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk). You open up the Mturk homepage and you browse the list of HITs. After a couple minutes, you see a nice juicy HIT that provides a decent reward.

But how do you know who this Requester is and how do you know they won’t capriciously reject your work? Well, if you’ve read my earlier article, “You’re on Your Own,” then you know that Amazon certainly won’t take your side.

So, what can you do? Well, there are a number of strategies you can take to protect yourself. I have written article detailing my advice on how to Avoid rejection, but there are some helpful resources out there for you. In this article, I’m going to discuss one of the best -- the Turker Nation online forums.

Turker Nation provides an array of forum topics for the Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers...and Requesters. For evaluating a Requester, they provide a very helpful forum with the title of
Requesters Hall of Fame/Shame

The Requester’s Hall of Fame/Shame contains posts from Mturk workers where they chronicle their experience with Requesters. This thread contains a wealth of experience from Mturk Workers as they tell the story of bad Requesters and, also, good Requesters -- and this is as good as bad report because knowing you can trust a Requester is important. The forum uses positive and negative graphic icons that quickly identify who is a good or bed Requester.

If you have any suspicions about a Requester, then I would readily suggest that you check this forum to see what other Workers are saying.

Also included in this thread are lists of spammer and scammers. These are folks who use Mturk to troll for customers or personal data. Although Amazon clearly states what jobs Requester can post as a HIT, Amazon does not police HITs and I rarely see Amazon boot anyone from Mturk.

Now, backing up some. I’ve had used the Hall of Fame/Shame in the past and found contradictory reports on a Requester. One poster will slam a Requester while another poster will say that things went well with the Requester. I would imagine that along with there being some bad requester, there are some bad workers. So ultimately, you will have to discern whether or not from the posts who you can trust. Obviously a slew of bad reports on a Requester should be heeded.

Turker Nation also offers from friendly forums along with their helpful information. They have a Turker Introduction forum for new Workers to introduce themselves. They include a Questions forums for Workers and Requesters to ask find answers or ask questions.

If you’re working for Mturk, then Turker Nation should be in your bookmarks/favorites. You’d be a fool to ignore a resource like this when doing work like this.

With Amazon Mechanical Turk, You’re on Your Own

Okay, like a lot of people, you’re trying to use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) to make some money online. You are a diligent and steadfast worker, providing your Requesters with expedient and quality work. Your Acceptance rate is a sterling 100% and the pennies are building up in your Amazon account.

Here are a couple scenarios to knock your Acceptance rate down and lower your trust not only in the Amazon Mechanical Turk system, but in humanity.

---

Scenario #1
One day you see a bunch of juicy HITs with a decent reward and decide to jump on them. You open the HITS and read the instructions. They seem somewhat ambiguous and there might be some contradictory instructions. You decide to plow ahead anyway because the HITs look easy and the reward is good. You take a couple hours and you have a lot slew of these HITs completed and are awaiting approval from the Requester.

The next day you log on to Amazon Mechanical Turn and much to your dismay you see the wreckage that was once Acceptance rate and a lack of money in your account.

Scenario #2
You see a nice HIT that handsomely rewards the worker for a writing assignment. The Requester is new the AMT game, but the HITs has a great set of instructions.

Do this to this degree.

Finish this to match this criteria.

There’s some research to be done and you hit the books (or the wikipedia) and you are armed with all your necessary facts. You then set down to write. After an hour or so, you have a piece of art ready for submission and do one final check, then hit the Submit button.

The next day you get to experience the an unqualified rejection with no explanation. You write the Requester and get no response.

---

Well, in a normal workplace, you’d go right to management in effort to fight injustice, defend inequity, and protect humanity. And you hope to get paid.

Good luck with that, I say. I have approached Amazon in the past with a complaint regarding a poorly worded series of HITs that received a slew of rejections and they cited their standard policies:

“A Requester may reject your work if they believe the answer is wrong, the HIT was not completed correctly or that the instructions were not followed. If you believe that your work was rejected in error, you may decide to contact the Requester directly.”

Then they cited their policy on their role in Amazon Mechanical Turk process:

Amazon Mechanical Turk's Role:
Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a venue for third-party Requesters and third-party Providers to enter into and complete transactions. Amazon Mechanical Turk and its Affiliates are not involved in the transactions between Requesters and Providers. As a result, we have no control over the quality, safety or legality of the Services, the ability of Providers to provide the Services to Requesters' satisfaction, or the ability of Requesters to pay for Services. We are not responsible for the actions of any Requester or Provider. We do not conduct any screening or other verification with respect to Requesters or Providers, nor do we provide any recommendations. As a Requester or a Provider, you use the Site at your own risk.”

In other words, you are on your own.

If you know this, you then can take steps to protect yourself from being taken advantage of. I have an article where I discuss how to Avoid Rejection in the dog-eat-dog world of AMT. Check it out.

Low Impact Strategies for Amazon Mechanical Turk

So, you want to make some money online and you’ve decided to become apart of Amazon’s online version of a modern sweatshop? And you know what you’re in for? (Read previous posts to learn more.)

There are two ways to approach Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk):
1) You can look for low impact/low-cost HITs that require little or no thought and pump them out one right after the other in a near-mindless state of conscious (or as you watch TV which is may be the same thing)
2) You can look for more involved, higher cost HITs that require some concentration, time, research, and eventually effort -- like writing assignments.

This article will focus on the low-impact approach.

Okay. How can you do this work in a low impact way that doesn’t cause you to work up a sweat and allows you to continue watching your reality TV show with your laptop in, well, your lap?

First, determine if the HIT is actually a low impact HIT. This may take some concentration, so wait for a commercial, open the HIT, and read the instructions. And that means reading all the instructions. The devil is in the details and some of the low cost HITs that look low impact may not really be.

For instance, I just reviewed at a $.10 HIT which initially looked quite easy. Get an address and hours of operation. Easy, right?

No, not really because the Requester also wanted the Worker to provide a half dozen key words on top of something other information.

So, it’s important to read all the instructions before committing to doing a slew of mindless HITS. If you get an important detail of the instructions wrong and then complete a bunch of HITs wrong, you’re in line for a whole slew of rejections. Rejections are really bad for your AMT profile because a high rejection rate can lower the amount of HITS you can have access to. (I know this all too well as I let my rate dip below 95% which excluded a great deal of HITS from me.)

If you do find a low impact HIT and you understand the instructions thoroughly, then you can go to town and in an assembly line fashion, pump those HITS out, one right after the other and watch the pennies pile up. And that’s what happens, you make pennies, but a lot of pennies can add up.

You have to be very fast and efficient to make this approach work for you. If you get bogged down, then you will see your effort transition to low impact to drudgery with a very low rate of return.

My advice is to set a (low) hourly wage floor (say, $3.00/hr. -- this isn’t rocket science and you shouldn’t expect rocket science pay). This is the lowest rate you want to work at and then do a few of the HITS. Then do the calculation as to whether you can hit or exceed that hourly wage floor by doing dozens of these HITS in an hour.

There are many people out that make this approach work for them. It is a good way to get lots of HITs completed and make a few dollars. It’s not the way I approach Mturk, but I’ll talk about my approach at a later time.

Why Work for Amazon Mechanical Turk?

There are some people who call Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (Mturk) the online version of sweatshop when it comes to making money online. And I can’t put up too much of an argument against that statement. There are some ridiculously low-paying tasks on AMT. Many are terribly exploitative of the workers and a very few aren’t.

One site specific to Mturk put up this sarcastic fake advertisement on their site:
HELP WANTED:
$1.20 / hour
Risk of repetitive stress injury
No care for on-the-job injuries
No guaranteed minimum wage
No guarantee of payment

So, why should someone consider work on Mturk?

First you have to know what you’re getting into before you even start.

If you are a foreign worker outside the U.S., your standard and cost of living may be low and working on AMT can actually provide you with some real money. But, for the sake of this article, I’m going to assume you live in the U.S. or some other developed and industrial country.

So, to re-phrase, why should a U.S. citizen consider working for Mturk?

You need some extra money. You have a bill to pay and a few extra bucks can make a difference. You want to save up extra money for a family vacation. (And I’m not talking about flying to orient. I’m thinking a trip to the local amusement park.)

Or you want a book or that new electronic thingamajig that just came out.

I’ve done it. I wanted to upgrade my MP3 player and worked on few handfuls of HITS in November and December last year, waiting for Amazon to drop the price to entice Christmas shoppers, and low and behold, I had a new MP3 player in hand with no money out of my normal operating budget.

If you’re just sitting around watching TV anyway, why not turn that time into some money?

Right now, as I write these words, there are over 7000 individual HITS worth $.50 a piece for workers to write book reviews of 150 words (or more). Take the HIT on, do a quick Google search of the book, read a few reviews, and get creative.

There are also nearly a thousand $.10 HITS for someone to find the local address of a business along with it’s hours of operation. If you need or want a few extra pennies in your pocket, then why not put your wasted time to good work?

If you aren’t desperate for money or can turn your spare time into another way to make more money, then Mturk is not for you. But if you’re just sitting there with a few minutes a day and want some extra money, there are worse ways to spend your time.

In the past month, I spent probably, on average, 90 minutes a day working on HITS and have made over $200. You can, too. You either have to be near desperate or really want something off Amazon.