What is Amazon Mechanical Turk and How to make Money?
What is Amazon Mechanical Turk and how to make money? In layman’s terms Amazon Mechanical Turk or MTurk is another freelancing platform but only for limited number of categories. Just like in any other freelancing platform, requesters (people who are looking for workers) post tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk and workers can apply for them and earn rewards.
How is Amazon Mechanical Turk different from the other freelancing platforms?
There are few main key differences between a usual freelancing platform and Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Amazon Mechanical Turk specially designed for the tasks humans can do better than computers and AIs. Tasks like identifying objects on an image, validating addresses or writing reviews about something (Movies, restaurants, songs, books, etc..) .
Amazon Mechanical Turk is a micro task platform. It doesn’t offer long-term projects. Very small tasks with very little rewards. If I explain Amazon Mechanical Turk with an example. It is similar to microworkers.com than upwork.com. Both are freelancing websites. But MicroWorkers offers very small micro jobs while Upwork provides long-term jobs.
How to make Money from Amazon Mechanical Turk?
The answer is simple. What you have to do is request to join AMT as a worker. They will let you know if you get accepted to the program within 3 business days. Once they accept your application, you can start accepting jobs they have posted in HITs dashboard.
Amazon Mechanical Turk minimum reward amount is $0.01 but there is no maximum limit. Reward for each job is determine by the requester. An average Amazon Mechanical Turk worker can earn around $1 – $6 per hour. Since this is a micro project platform, most tasks are under $1. But these tasks are super easy. You only need basic computer knowledge to complete them.
What type of jobs are available on Amazon Mechanical Turk?
Here is the list of available job categories on Amazon Mechanical Turk for freelancers.
Image/Video Processing
- Tagging objects found in an image to improve search or advertising targeting
- Helping companies select the best picture to represent a product
- Audit user-uploaded images or videos to moderate content
- Classifying and identify objects found in satellite imagery
Data Verification and Clean-up
- Removing duplicate content from business listings
- Identifying incomplete or duplicate product listings in a catalog
- Verifying restaurant details such as phone numbers or hours of operation
- Converting unstructured data about locations into well-formed addresses
Information Gathering
- Answering questions from a computer or mobile device about any topic
- Filling out market research or survey data on a variety of topics
- Writing content for websites
- Finding specific fields or data elements in large legal and government documents
Data Processing
- Editing and transcribing audio content
- Translating content from one language to another
- Rating the accuracy of search results
- Categorizing information based on instructions
Now you know What is Amazon Mechanical Turk and How to make Money on Amazon MTurk. But the ultimate question is “Is Amazon Mechanical Turk a good way to make money?“
Well it depends. If you want to work fulltime as a freelancer, Amazon Mechanical Turk is not the place for you. There are so many other platforms that you can earn way more money as a fulltime freelancer. But if you are looking for an easy zero investment side hustle just to make some extra buck, MTurk is a great platform for you. It has low competition and lots of job opportunities. So is it worth working in Amazon Mechanical Turk? Yes it is. But only as a side hustle.
If you have more time in your hand, Fiverr is a better choice for you. Checkout my articles about Fiverr Freelancing.
Mawan Lakshan Aluvihare is a software engineer, social media marketer and an online entrepreneur in Sri Lanka. He completed his bachelor's degree in Interactive Media at Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology in 2014. He is a level 2 seller on Fiverr, a successful dropshipper and the owner of redwolfTAG Solution, a web development company in Sri Lanka.
