1 BTC Project - Mechanical Turk

By 2MFTProductions | 1BTC | 20 May 2023

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually. This could include anything from conducting simple data validation and research to more subjective tasks like survey participation, content moderation, and more. MTurk enables companies to harness the collective intelligence, skills, and insights from a global workforce to streamline business processes, augment data collection and analysis, and accelerate machine learning development.

mturk.com

While technology continues to improve, there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as moderating content, performing data deduplication, or research. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce, which is time consuming, expensive and difficult to scale, or have gone undone. Crowdsourcing is a good way to break down a manual, time-consuming project into smaller, more manageable tasks to be completed by distributed workers over the Internet (also known as ‘microtasks’).

I don't remember how I stumbled onto Mturk but I started in 2019 and still use it quite often. Mechanical Turk was my first foray into internet side hustles and microtasks. Although being in Canada the earning potential is limited compared to what is offered to workers in the states, it still is a pleasant compliment to my fiat job. In my day to day I spend long spells of time waiting on hold. So this platform was a great way for me to monetize my downtime. Depending on your qualifications you can select a Human Intelligence Task (HIT), execute your task, and get paid in Amazon gift cards.

The payments can vary widely. As you can see above if you qualify, you can get paid $22 USDT for completing the task. HIT vary from surveys (like you are most likely used to) to transcription, to audio recording, to training AI.

You are graded on success. Obviously no one wants to pay for sloppy work. Unfortunately, if you find a good HIT - lets say a business card transcription- where you can bang out 50-100 HITs over the course of a day, you won't know if you're doing it wrong until it is too late. A few times I was performing a task poorly and had to spend a while digging myself out of a hole. If your Approval Rate drops too low, you no longer qualify for the best HITs.

This is my fifth year using MTurk and I have earning just under $1,000 USDC for my efforts. $200 / year is never going to get you rich, but I use it as a way to make money while I make money. The pay outs are not in Cash or Crypto but in Amazon Gift cards. I explained in my first post how I used Mturk as the prime mover in my online hustle chain. I found a convoluted way to turn my Amazon gift cards into Bitcoin. You can do the same, or use it to offset costs. Mturk does work. But the earning potential has decrease steadily over the last few years. Because of the drop off, it occupies less of my attention. Regardless it could still serve you well.

I don't know how long this will be around. Their twitter account's, @amazonmturk, hasn't tweeted in two years at time of writing.

I give Amazon's Mechanical Turk 2 out of 5 stars. Its slow, but it pays in American Amazon dollars.. If you are in America you are at a huge advantage when it comes to qualifying for HITs. With some time spent and a little luck, making $10 per month isn't out of reach. The score is lower now than it would have been years ago because of how many steps it would take to turn your HIT rewards into BTC. If you have downtime at work you may want to check it out.