Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)

This service was initially invented for Amazon's in-house use by Peter Cohen, to find duplicates among its web pages describing products. Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that enables computer programmers to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are currently unable to do. It is one of the suites of Amazon Web Services. The Requesters are able to post tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a store-front, writing product descriptions

According to a survey conducted through one MTurk HIT, Turkers are primarily located in the United States with demographics generally similar to the overall Internet population in the US

In March 2007, there were reportedly more than 100,000 workers in over 100 countries.. This increased to over 500,000 workers from over 190 countries in January 2011. In the same year, techlist published an interactive map pinpointing the locations of 50,000 of their MTurk workers around the world

Amazon keeps track of how much you earn with Mechanical Turk, and it’s important to know that some requesters will not pay you immediately.  Mechanical Turk earnings will appear in your Amazon back office, and you will also be able to see your total if you click on the heading Amazon payments.  You can convert the money to Amazon gift cards for purchases on the Amazon website, or if you prefer to be paid in cash, simply add your bank account information to your Amazon profile

Criticism

Because HITs are typically simple, repetitive tasks and users are paid often only a few cents to complete them, some have criticized Mechanical Turk as a "virtual sweatshop". At the same time, workers set their own hours and are not under any obligation to accept any work they do not wish to do. Because workers are paid as contractors rather than employees, requesters do not have to file forms for, nor pay payroll taxes, and they avoid laws regarding minimum wage, overtime, and workers compensation. Workers, though, must report their income as self-employment income. In addition, some requesters have taken advantage of workers by having them do the tasks, then rejecting their submissions in order to avoid paying. However, at least some workers on Mechanical Turk are people who do the work for fun

Turkopticon

Turkopticon adds functionality to Amazon Mechanical Turk as you browse for HITs and review status of work you've done. As you browse HITs, Turkopticon places a button next to each requester and highlights requesters for whom there are reviews from other workers. Bad reviews let you avoid shady employers and good reviews help you find fair ones. You can view reports made against requesters with a quick click.

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Is it worthwhile?

If you have the ability to throw down readable writing very quickly, you can earn minimum wage with the Turk – more than I ever expected. Given the short timeframe and the wide variety of tasks available, it’s something that you can sit down and do in short little bits when it’s convenient for you. Turk earns well enough that you might be able to fill in spare moments with it – or use it as a stopgap when you’re job hunting – but approximating minimum wage isn’t a good reason to just sit at your computer and click all day. If you have the abilities to earn minimum wage at Turk over an eight hour period, you’d be much better served using that mental energy building something for yourself – a blog on a topic you’re passionate about, a healthy network of people in your field, or something similar.