One of the most popular turk programs is Amazon Mechanical Turk. I know that it has the Amazon Name on it, but I wanted to find out if it was a scam or a legit work from home opportunity.
If you don’t know being a turk is completing short tasks for payments, it’s a lot like data entry but there are a lot of different tasks that can be completed. A lot of the paid to do sites like SwagBucks offer a section called tasks that is similar, but with Amazon Mechanical Turk you can only earn by completing tasks.
Please understand that Turk websites won’t earn you much money. It’s usually a low hourly rate. If you’re looking to make a full-time income online, check out My #1 Recommendation, it’s how I made over $13,000 last month!
Lets jump right in and see is Amazon Mechanical Turk A Scam or Legit.
How Does Amazon Mechanical Turk Work?
Once you join as an Amazon Mechanical Turk you will need to start completing tasks to get paid. The tasks available to complete are called HITs. There are usually hundreds of HITs available for anyone to complete.
The HITs will show you exactly what you will need to do, how much you will get paid, and how long they think it should take to complete.
Find a HIT that you would like to try. Complete the tasks that are required, then submit your work.
The Requestor (person you’re doing the work for) will review your work and once they except it you will get paid.
You will continue to repeat this process on other HITs to make money.
How Much Does Amazon Mechanical Turk Pay?
There really isn’t any exact answer. This is like doing freelance work or paid to do sites where it all depends on how many tasks you can do and how much they pay.
From my experience you expect to earn $2-$5 a hour depending on the details of the tasks you complete.
You may get lucky and have a good hour that makes you more, but averaging more then $5 and hour is pretty much unheard of.
How Do They Pay?
Amazon MTurk has two different forms of payment. Both only require you to have $1 in your account to get paid.
The first option is through direct deposit to a bank account. Payments can be requested at anytime and usually take 3-4 days to show up in your account.
The second option is having your earnings added to your Amazon Gift Card Balance. Payments can be requested anytime and usually happen within 24 hours with this option.
Amazon MTurk Quality Scores
As you complete different HITs the requestor leaves feedback for the work you submitted. This feedback all comes together to create your quality score.
The quality score is pretty important with Amazon MTurk. The main reason being that requestors can reject your work, but if you have a high score they are more likely to accept it just because you do quality work all the time.
Also when you join not all HITs will be available to you. As your quality score goes up you can unlock more HITs and specialty tests will become available that will allow you to complete HITs in categories that require a certain skill and usually pay more.
As long as you consistently provided quality work you should have no problem keeping a high quality score and unlocking new HITs.
Amazon MTurk Concerns and Complaints
When I review sites and companies I have to provide you some concerns and complaints. Honestly with Amazon MTurk I have quite a few to bring up.
How Much You Earn
My biggest concern with Amazon Mechanical Turk is how much you can earn. I talk a bit about it in the payments section, but there is no hourly rate that you will be paid. It all depends on how much work you put in.
For sites like these you usually only get paid a few cents for each task that you complete. Even if it only takes a minute to do each task I wouldn’t expect making more then $2-5 dollars an hour.
To me that’s not a good rate, because I can make much more doing other things, like writing and reviewing products on my site.
Work Not Excepted
The next complaint I have is when you complete a task and submit it the requester of the task (person you’re doing the work for,) can say that you did not do quality work.
If the hits you complete aren’t excepted then you don’t get paid for your time and work.
Unfortunately, there are some people who just mark work as poor just so they don’t have to pay for it. With Amazon MTurk requesters can deny your work for any reason with no explanation, which makes it easy for them to screw you over.
So Is Amazon Mechanical Turk A Scam?
Amazon Mechanical Turk is not a scam. It’s actually a completely legit way to make money online. Personally I don’t recommend you joining this site. I don’t think making $2-$5 an hour is worth it.
Add in the concern of getting screwed over by the requester, and I think you’re kind of wasting your time and not getting paid well for your time.
But Amazon Mechanical is not a scam so if you would like to join visit their website here.
If you that agree that earning $2-$5 a hour isn’t worth it, check out some of my other Work At Home Opportunities I’ve marked scam free and recommend.
If a small extra income isn’t for you, check out My #1 Recommendation. It’s how I work from home and made over $13,000 last month!
Thank you for reading. Amazon Mechanical Turk is not a scam, but I don’t recommend this site. Have you used Amazon MTurk? Other Turk Sites? Let me know your thoughts below!
Hey, Brok nice post!
I love how you cover genuineness of Amazon mechanical Turk in this post.
We also cover things like Sign up process, it’s complete working and some tips to increase mturk earnings that you don’t cover in this article.
If you are interested checkout and feel free to link back to your site.
once again thanks for this amazing content.
Keep up the great work!