Before I share my experience, let me show you how to start making money with Amazon Mechanical Turk in
5 easy steps!
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is currently the most popular crowdsourced marketplace for work. It has rapidly transformed how social science research is conducted. Over the past three or four years, MTurk has been enthusiastically adopted across the social sciences as a viable mainstream alternative to using students or other respondents to conduct experimental and survey-based research.
For social scientists, collecting data with MTurk has three compelling advantages:
- Cheap data: With an MTurk sample, data collection is cheap! Compared to other online panels, respondent costs can be as much as 80-90% lower, so data collection budgets stretch much further.
- Fast data: Data collection is fast. It is entirely possible to gather a few hundred responses within an hour or two. Researchers love the speed because they can test their ideas quickly.
- Quality data: The quality of data is acceptable. Since 2010, a number of studies have validated data quality of MTurk samples, finding it to be sufficiently diverse (although not representative), and comparable to other more expensive online data sources.
Making money has never been so easy! Amazon Mechanical Turk is a platform that allows you to make money doing simple tasks that you may already be familiar with. By using this platform, you can find work that fits your schedule and that you are already familiar with. In this post, we are going to provide you with 5 easy steps that will help you get started making money with Amazon Mechanical Turk. From signing up for an account to finding a task that you are qualified to do, these steps will have you up and running in no time. So what are you waiting for? Start making money today with Amazon Mechanical Turk!
1. What is Amazon Mechanical Turk?
Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) is a platform where people can
work on tasks that require human intelligence. It's an online marketplace where
people can find tasks that they can complete for a small fee.
There are a lot of ways to make money with AMT, and this is
a great way to get started. In this article, we will show you 5 easy steps to
start making money with AMT.
2. How to find your project
The first step in making money with Amazon Mechanical Turk
is to find a project that you can contribute to. Once you've found a project,
head over to the Mechanical Turk website and click on "Browse
Projects."
After you've found a project that you're interested in,
click on the "Contribute" link to be taken to the project submission
form.
On the project submission form, you'll need to provide the
following information:
1. Your name
2. Your email address
3. The project you're contributing to
4. Your HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks)
5. The amount of time that you'll be contributing to the
project
6. Your HITs quality
7. Your rating
8. Your username
9. Your gender
10. Your country
11. Your phone number
12. Your HITs quality (0-5)
13. Your rating (0-5)
14. Your username
15. Your gender
16. Your country
17. Your phone number
18. Your HITs quality (0-5)
19. Your rating (0-5)
20. Your username
21. Your gender
22. Your country
23. Your phone number
24. Your HITs quality (0-5)
25. Your rating (0-5)
26. Your username
27. Your gender
28. Your country
29. Your phone number
30. Your HITs quality (0-5)
31. Your rating (0-5)
32. Your username
33. Your gender
34. Your country
35. Your phone number
36. Your HITs quality (0-5)
37. Your rating (0-5)
38. Your username
39. Your gender
40. Your country
41. Your phone number
42. Your HITs quality (0-5)
43. Your rating (0-5)
44. Your username
45. Your gender
46. Your country
47. Your phone number
48. Your HITs quality (0-5)
49. Your rating (0-5)
50. Your username
after you've filled out the form, click on the
"submit" button to submit it.
Once the form has been submitted, you'll be taken to a
confirmation page where you'll need to click on the
3. How to start working
If you're like most people, you probably have at least a few
questions about how to make money on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Well, I'm here to
answer all of your questions so you can start making money right away!
First, you'll need to create an account on Amazon Mechanical
Turk. This is free and easy to do. Once you have an account, you'll be ready to
start working.
There are a few ways to start working on Amazon Mechanical
Turk. You can either work on tasks provided by Amazon Mechanical Turk or you
can create your own tasks.
If you're working on tasks provided by Amazon Mechanical
Turk, you'll be working on tasks that are specific to a certain task or task
type and you'll be paid based on the task's completion time and the quality of
the task.
If you're working on tasks that you create yourself, you'll
be paid based on the task's completion time and the quality of the task.
Once you've started working, the next step is to start earning
money. Here are five easy steps to help you start making money on Amazon
Mechanical Turk:
1) Set your task completion deadlines and quality standards
2) Set your task prices
3) Set your task start times
4) Set your task frequency
5) Manage your task queues
With these steps, you'll be able to start making money on
Amazon Mechanical Turk in no time!
4. Tips for successful completion
Starting off with Mechanical Turk can be a little daunting,
but with the help of these 5 easy steps, you'll be on your way to making money
in no time!
1. Decide what task you would like to complete.
2. Look for tasks that are relevant to your field of interest.
3. Make sure the task is of a manageable size.
4. Set a budget and find tasks that fit within your budget.
5. Find tasks that are suited to your skill level.
Once you have completed your task, be sure to submit it and
wait for your payment!
5. Conclusion
So there you have it, 5 easy steps to starting making money
with Amazon Mechanical Turk. With just a bit of effort on your part, you can be
making money doing what you love, which is a huge incentive in itself!
MY EXPERIENCE
As a researcher, I love using MTurk and have conducted more
than 50 studies on it so far. Over the past week, however, I changed roles.
Instead of posting a study as I usually do, I worked part-time as an MTurk
worker. I spent approximately twenty-five hours and took approximately
300 surveys on the site, answering everything from questions about witness
testimony to watching advertisement videos and evaluating them, and solving
creative problems.
I undertook this exercise for two selfish reasons. First, I
wanted to experience life on the “other side of the fence” so
to speak, to feel what an MTurk worker’s experience is like so I could be more
empathetic in conducting my future studies on MTurk. Second, I wanted to
understand how other researchers are using the site, to adopt some of
their best practices in designing surveys, recruiting
respondents, managing respondents, and so on in my own research.
My experience as an MTurk worker was intense, full of
surprises, not all of which were pleasant. Here’s what I learnt from my
experience as an MTurk worker:
1. MTurk workers do not earn much money and the site made
it impossible to figure out how much I earned per hour of work I performed.
As an MTurk worker, I worked hard but I earned little money.
If my experience is any indication, the wages of a typical, diligent MTurk
worker are nowhere close to the minimum stipulated wages in the United States. Over my one
week as an MTurk worker, I estimate that I earned somewhere between $3
and $3.25 per hour of work (and that includes a couple of unexpected
bonuses).
Even more bothersome was the fact the site did not
provide me with my “per-hour” earnings information anywhere so there was no way
for me to know precisely how much I made per hour. As a researcher (or
“requester” in MTurk parlance), the site provides me with an “Effective Hourly
Rate” value that I pay my workers. So why can’t a worker have this
information? It would be nice to know precisely how many hours I worked
and how much money I made in my MTurk dashboard.
As an ethical researcher, this part of my experience
struck me the hardest. Now I cannot help but feel guilty and even embarrassed
about how much (or actually, how little) money I have been paying participants
of my studies. While it is true that I want to collect data as cheaply and efficiently
as possible (I have a limited research budget, after all), I do not want
to exploit people who work for me. MTurk is raising the commission they charge researchers
on July 22,
and I wonder if any of these spoils will be shared with its workers.
2. Not all researchers posting surveys on MTurk are
ethical. On MTurk, unethical actions play out in a number of different ways,
some small, and others exploitative.
I was surprised by the degree and variety of what I, as an
MTurk worker, perceived to be unethical researcher behavior. In answering
surveys, I was made to work much longer than promised, refused payment for work
I had already done without sufficient explanation or recourse, and I was not
provided with an appropriate method to protest or to receive redress. Here are
some things I experienced:
- Many
questionnaires took WAY longer to complete than the
researcher had promised. For example, one survey informed me that it would
take no more than five minutes and offered me $.25, but then the
researcher forced me to watch a video that went on for 11 minutes (and was
still going on, at which point I abandoned the study).
- In one
instance, my work was rejected because I did not answer one question the
researcher had inserted somewhere within a 100+ question survey to measure
my attention correctly. I was not informed that such a thing could happen
in the beginning of the survey. There was nothing I could do about this.
Answering one wrong question negated the dozens of right answers I had
provided. How could I not help feeling exploited?
- In
another instance, I was supposed to receive a completion code at the end
of the study, but there was no completion code, the survey just ended
abruptly. Needless to say, I did not earn even the twenty-five cents I had
been promised.
- In a
number of questionnaires I completed over the week, there was no initial
informed consent form, and in other cases, even when such a form was
provided, no specific researcher was clearly identified. I had no one to
ask questions or complain to. This is particularly problematic when
questions are about complex issues like moral decisions (“Would you kill
one person you know to save a dozen strangers?”)
Unethical behaviors have many causes, and often arise simply
from the ignorance or incompetence of individuals rather than willful
subversion. Regardless of motivations, I feel that the site itself makes it
easy for researchers to transgress ethical norms. As one example, many
researchers posting their surveys use pseudonyms instead of real names, a
recipe for encouraging questionable behaviors. As another example, there is no
way for a worker to revisit his or her work and see if they actually made the
mistake the researcher is accusing them of. Why not force researchers
to use their real names and affiliations when posting work on the site?
3. Many studies are poorly designed and slow workers
down.
There was a surprising amount of variance in the quality of
the questionnaires I answered. While a majority of questionnaires were
exemplary, I came across surveys from academic researchers belonging to
reputable institutions that were so riddled with grammatical errors and
spelling mistakes that it was impossible to understand what I was being asked
about. At other times, the flow of questions made little sense and stumped me
completely. Dealing with such problems took more time and reduced my earnings
rate even further. I feel that quality control is sorely needed among
researchers if this site is to remain a viable platform that attracts diligent
and thoughtful respondents. For my part, I have been conscientious
about quality control in designing my own surveys and intend to be
even more watchful in the future.
4. Answering surveys consecutively produces biased
responses.
In a single afternoon, when I completed about fifteen
surveys one after the other over a period of several hours, I came across the
following paragraph in four different studies:
“We go to the city often. Our anticipation fills us as we
see the skyscrapers come into view. We allow ourselves to explore every corner,
never letting an attraction escape us. Our voice fills the air and street. We
see all the sights, we window shop, and everywhere we go we see our reflection
looking back at us in the glass of a hundred windows. At nightfall we linger, our
time in the city almost over. When finally we must leave, we do so knowing that
we will soon return. The city belongs to us.”
Each time, I was instructed by the researcher to count the
number of pronouns (“Our”, “we”, “ourselves”) in the paragraph. This paragraph
is part of a “pronoun circling task” that is commonly used to prime
a concept that psychologists call relational
collectivism (a different version of this paragraph uses “I”, “me”,
etc. instead to prime an individualism concept, but strangely, I was assigned
to the collectivism paragraph in all four studies!). By the time I came across
this paragraph the third time that afternoon, I already knew the answer to the
question of “how many pronouns?” So I could easily skip reading it. Needless to
say, the priming task did not work on me by then.
Over my one week completing MTurk surveys, I filled out scales
measuring psychological traits like impulsive buying, moral identity,
collectivism, and subjective well-being over and over again. In some cases, the
scales were measuring my personality after an experimental manipulation but in
other cases, the same scale WAS the manipulation.
This led me to wonder: Do psychological researchers
account for the possibility that their MTurk participants may have just
completed a similar study, or even been primed with a contrasting concept
recently when they analyze their MTurk data or draw inferences from it? Are
their conclusions still valid? These and a host of related questions
need to be answered carefully by researchers to determine the scope and limits
of collecting data on MTurk from respondents who complete hundreds of surveys a week.
5. The site is heavily loaded in favor of requesters and
against workers.
If I had to summarize my one-week experience as an MTurk
worker in one phrase, it would be a “sustained sense of powerlessness.” After
I had completed a study, there was no way for me to go back and identify who
the researcher was that I had worked for. If a researcher rejected my work and
did not pay me, the only thing I could do is send them an email through MTurk.
I had no formal way of rating or sharing what I perceived to
be the injustice of a particular researcher. There was no way for me to
complain to the MTurk customer service folks (if such folks even exist) about
the potential problems with a survey or researcher.
All of these issues have to do with the way the site is
designed and structured. It seems to me that if these issues are not dealt with
properly and quickly, the site is eventually going to resemble a child labor
operation in its ethos more than a crowdsourced market for labor. There
needs to be more balance in power between the employers and workers than currently exists on the site. While
these issues are beyond my control, as a researcher, my main takeaway is that I
need to be a lot more empathetic to the workers that I employ on the site.
So what lessons did I learn as a researcher from my
experience?
My biggest lesson from my experience as an MTurk worker is
that I need to pay more for my studies than I have been doing.
There is no question in my mind that paying $.40 or $.50 for a survey is too
little. I personally believe in fair wages for fair work, so I will
significantly increase how much I offer the people who participate in my study.
I will also be more careful about what sort of
studies I conduct on MTurk. Until my experience as a worker, the issue of
potential biasing effects of completing a dozen studies one after the other on
the quality of responses was not even on my radar screen. For me personally,
MTurk data will be appropriate for initial pretests and exploratory research;
but it is clear that I need less “professional” respondents who have not been
primed with the same concept multiple times in one session to conduct rigorous
and valid tests of my research hypotheses!
All in all, my experience as an MTurk worker was a revelation that has made me look at using MTurk as a researcher in an entirely new light.
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