MTurk Money - Step by Step to Making Money Efficiently on MTurk

By Tim Wallace

This easy to digest ebook offers a step by step guide to working efficiently on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform, popularly called MTurk. MTurk is an Amazon owned crowdsourcing, platform where individuals sign up and are paid to complete a wide range of basic digital tasks. This guide is for both existing MTurk workers and those who have never heard of it, but are looking for a way to earn a side income from home, starting almost immediately.

Getting properly set up and navigating the platform's learning curve will be made significantly easier with the content and advice contained here. Ten years of experience completing tasks on MTurk have been condensed into this guide. This will have a notable impact on your capacity to earn on the platform, and maximizing your time to earning ratio.

note: This ebook is written for a U.S. audience. However, if you are eligible for an MTurk account in your country, it will be of benefit to you too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tim Wallace
• Release date: Mar 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393690870

Book preview

1

What is Mturk?

Mturk is short for Mechanical Turk, and the full platform name is Amazon Mechanical Turk. This is a crowdsourcing website owned and operated by Amazon. This platform was launched in 2005, initially to get small repetitive tasks completed for listings on Amazon's ecommerce site. These included categorizing product listings, moderating listing images etc.

Since then it has grown to a platform hosting tasks posted by most major household names, such as Google, Pinterest, Microsoft, Yahoo and much more. It also hosts research tasks posted by researchers in most major academic institutions around the world. Havard, Yale, Cornell, Stanford and all the big names are fully represented on the platform with frequent tasks.

Mturk is not limited to businesses or academic institutions. Any individual can post tasks on the platform, so at any given time, there are thousands of tasks available to be completed. You get access to a lot of them once your worker account is approved.

Work Status/Capacity - Do I Work for Amazon or Mturk?

When you sign up as a worker on Mturk, you are not being hired by Mturk or Amazon. Every work activity you engage on the platform is purely in an Independent Contractor capacity. This means you are not entitled to any sort of protections or benefits an employee would get, as you are not an employee. This also means you are not protected against any local wage protections, like minimum wage. As a result, you will often come across tasks which compensate the worker at well below Federal minimum wage.

As an Independent Contractor, you have complete control over your choice to either engage the task or ignore it. Therefore, people who post such tasks aren't obligated to comply with any local, state or federal wage rates.

What Parties are Involved on Mturk?

There are three parties involved on Mturk, and these are:

a. Worker: The worker, or turker, as they are commonly called is the person who signs up to complete tasks posted to the platform. The worker is there to earn money. This is you.

b. Requester: The Requester is the business entity, academic institution or individual who posts work to the platform. The Requester needs a task completed, and compensates the Worker to do so.

c. Platform: Mturk is the platform which hosts the meeting and facilitates the compensation between both parties mentioned above. The platform earns money in form of a fee to the Requester of tasks on the platform.

2

How to Sign up

Signing up on Mturk is pretty simple and straightforward. Here are the steps to get your account setup underway.

1. Go to https://mturk.com

2. Click on Get Started with Amazon Mechanical Turk

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3. Click on Create a Worker Account

This takes you to a sign in page. If you have an existing Amazon account, you can simply

Reviews for MTurk Money - Step by Step to Making Money Efficiently on MTurk

[Charles E · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As someone just starting out on mturk, I found this very informative, eye opening and straight to the point.