Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)

Owned by Amazon, Mechanical Turk (also known by it’s shortname of MTurk) is one of the most reviewed Micro-Task sites in the world. Which shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering it’s owned by one of the largest companies in the world – Amazon.

Hundreds of thousands of people from the 43 countries MTurk currently operates in use this service to complete Micro-Tasks every day.

In this review, we will look at the pros and cons of using Amazon Mechanical Turk and if it’s worth your time working through the stages required to get paid, as well as what type of work you’ll be expected to complete and how much money you can make.

 

So, let us begin with the facts…

As we’ve said above, Amazon Mechanical Turk is available in 43 countries. You can see a whether your country is supported by clicking HERE.

It was created all the way back in 2005, making it one of the oldest and most established Micro-Task sites available. Plus, as we’ve also said, because it’s owned by Amazon it’s 100% legitimate.

People use the MTurk service to complete small tasks that are known as “HITs” – which stands for “Human Intelligence Tasks.

 

Can anyone work using Amazon Mechanical Turk?

No, not all countries are supported. At the time of writing this review the service is only available in 43 countries. If you want to check whether MTurk works in your country Click HERE..

You must also be 18+ to use it.

Finally, when registering, you must pass their verification and qualification tests. We passed these and therefore can report our findings first hand.

 

What did we find when using Amazon Mechanical Turk?

We got accepted and qualified to use Amazon Mechanical Turk and went on to work using the platform for around 3 weeks.

During that time we earned a total of $54.08 which is an average of $2.57 per day from working every day over a 3 week period.

For this money, we submitted 2,382 jobs. From those xxx submitted jobs, 2,375 were approved. This meant that over 99% of the jobs we submitted were approved and paid.

This approval rate for work was one of the best we found from all the Micro-Task sites we used.

Unfortunately, the money we earned from 3 weeks worth of work (and with a 99%+ job approval rate) didn’t make financial sense to us. Earning an average of $2.57 a day just isn’t sustainable!

Below you can see screenshots of our earnings:

 

If earning $2.57 a day isn’t sustainable – is it worth using Amazon MTurk?

We didn’t believe that our experience was unique. Nor did we believe that we simply didn’t do enough work to get paid enough – after all we completed nearly 2,500 jobs!

So, based on our experience, the answer to this question would be no. We do not believe using Amazon MTurk is worth it.

However, there are lots of what we consider to be completely genuine and credible people who say they earn $10 or more an hour using MTurk.

These people are also saying that people who have just started working with Amazon MTurk need to persevere and complete training in order to earn a better hourly rate.

That’s fine, but we estimated that it would take us a considerable amount of time to train and become proficient in different 3rd party tools in order to increase our income.

For us to find out whether this was really possible we decided to do some more research.

 

From our additional research, the results were shocking!

On researching whether the vast majority people can really earn a sustainable income using Amazon Mechanical Turk we found the following research article:

Click HERE To Read The Article

The information found in this article is shocking and made us realize we weren’t the only one’s who were earning extremely low amounts of money when working with Amazon Mechanical Turk.

The key facts from the article are:

  • The just 4% of workers reached the USA’s minimum federal wage of more than $7.25 per hour
  • The average pay for workers was just $1.77 per hour
  • More than 86% of people quit within 3 weeks due to low payments

So, it appears that our results from using MTurk weren’t unique, and quite honestly we find the idea that the “average pay for workers is just $1.77 per hour” truly shocking!

 

Our conclusion

Amazon MTurk is, in our opinion, a perfectly legitimate but incredibly hard to make money online.

It’s legitimate because they approve over 99% of the work submitted and make regular payments to people for work carried out.

However, it’s incredibly hard to make money due to the extremely low rates of pay being offered.

Therefore, in our opinion, you should only ever consider working for Amazon Mechanical Turk if you’re happy with an average pay of just a few dollars per hour.

Otherwise, you should seek alternative opportunities.

 

Our Rating

70%
Quality Of The Company and Job
In terms of the company, it’s Amazon, so you know you’re working with a global mega-business. Also the work is relatively straight-forward to complete but the amount of pay you’ll receive just isn’t enough.

 

100%
Price
There’s no cost whatsoever to use Amazon Mechanical Turk so we have to give a top rating here.

 

50%
Availability
People in 43 countries can use Amazon Mechanical Turk. While it’s not world-wide, it does cover a lot of people.

 

0%
Support
Something we didn’t mention in our review, but the level of support from Amazon on this is virtually non-existent. Support emails feel like they’re answered by robots and aren’t helpful. Basically, there’s no support.

Overall, we do NOT RECOMMEND working with Amazon Mechanical Turk due to the incredibly low pay you’ll receive. We feel that in the end the vast majority of people will give up and therefore we’d advise you to not waste your time.