So, yesterday I did a huge batch of the wonderful Project Endor HITs and I’m now a member of the 1K Turking club, y’all!
Now, each of these HITs only paid $.03 so I’m not rich after doing over 500, but I did have a pretty good day. This is a good example of finding a nice batch that will go quickly, help you get your numbers up, and pay fairly well. In these particular HITs they each took me about 10-25 seconds and simply involved recording a spoken phrase. Now, if you haven’t checked out Project Endor HITs before, you definitely need to. The rumor is that Project Endor is actually Google and judging by how much these HITs made me fear that Google Glass is going to take over the world (“OK Glass, start an experiment”…. ) that conjecture seems to fit. Either way, PE pays fairly, approves quickly, and is a low-risk requester.
In other news, I got approved for CrowdSource! This means that once I get my set up emails and get everything squared away on their online platform, known as WorkStation, I’ll start letting y’all know what the experience is like. Be sure to leave me a comment if you have any experience already with CrowdSource and have any tips or tricks for me before I dive in!
So, my partner has been on vacation and it is much more difficult to get any turking done with an added source of distraction in the house. Plus, we’ve been out of the house a lot, running around town, visiting with friends, and general summer time revelry. I did, however, want to do a quick little update while I have a moment of quiet.
Amen. Especially not during all these World Cup matches…
First of all, I reached the 500 mark and am inching closer to 1000. I have to say, I haven’t noticed much of a change in available HITs at the 500 mark but there have been a few extra surveys or tasks that I have qualified since reaching this milestone. I’m hoping that at 1k I’ll open up quite a few different tasks from requesters I’m already working for and all those random surveys looking for serious turkers. I’m sure though, as it always seems to go, once I reach one milestone then I’ll only seem to notice all the other available tasks that require 2k, 5k, etc.
Secondly, I’ve been using HITscraper recently with somewhat mixed results. I like some of the features and it does make searching easier, but I haven’t really noticed a huge improvement in finding good HITs. The downsides, however, may just be a result of not having been turking an awful lot lately. I will, once I get back up and turking everyday again, try to get up a post and a short video about setting up HITscraper and discuss the features for you all.
I also finally completed my CrowdSource writing application so, if I am approved, I’ll be writing up a piece on my experience doing some of their writing HITs and let you know how those size up in comparison with the more generic HITs available.
For now, I’m off to go identify some more butts, penises, and vaginas at $.04 a HIT!
Greetings! It’s been a busy week for me, but I’ve still been slowly but surely creeping towards my second HIT milestone, 500!
In the last episode I promised to discuss the payment system and how long it took before I was able to actually get my hands on all those MTurk pennies. As a woman of my word, here we go.
Firstly, I wasn’t sure what to expect as far as when my money would be available. The most common time period I read about was 10 days of doing at least 3 HITs per day. Now, some said that these “active” days did not need to be consecutive, others said they had to be in a row. In the image below you can see that I did my first HIT on May 25th, but I only did one transcription that day so I didn’t think it would count as an “active” day. Because I was sure whether the 25th would count or not, I started checking my ability to transfer around June 3.
I was active for a total of 7 days before I was able to start transferring my earnings.
When I tried on June 5th, viola! I was able to transfer my funds. That means that it took 7 days of 3+ HITs per day until I was able to transfer my earnings.
Now, before we go any further let me give you a few tips for preparing to get your money. During your waiting period, make sure that you go to Amazon Payments and start an account and set up a bank account that you want to transfer your money in to. You can also just transfer your earnings to an Amazon gift card, but I suspect most will want to get that cold, hard, electronic transfer straight into their banks. Amazon Payments offers to different ways for you to verify your bank account; one involves logging in with your bank log-in info and one involves micro-transactions into your bank account. As I understand it, some banks do not allow the first option and it felt just a bit shifty to enter my bank log-in info, so I went with the micro-transactions. Basically, Amazon will make two small transfers into your bank account, you will confirm the amounts, and then your account is approved. This process can take a few days or longer so it’s a good idea to go ahead and get it set-up before you are able to transfer your earnings.
Now I’ll walk you through the steps you’ll take to transfer your earnings out. First, go to your “Dashboard” and in the upper-right you will see the amount of earnings you have available to transfer out. Click on “Transfer Earnings” to move along to the next step.
Click on “Transfer Earnings” to check if you are able to transfer your earnings yet and to go to the next step once you are good to go.
The next screen you see should look like the image below. Here you type in the amount you want to transfer and click on the “Continue” button.
As you can see, this screen also shows you a history of your previous transfers.
When you click through, you’ll be taken to your Amazon Payments account which you will have already set up. You will need to click on the “Withdraw Funds” tab at the top. The “Withdraw Funds” screen should look like what you see below. Here you’ll be able to choose what account you want to transfer your earnings to (or choose to transfer them to a gift card) and specify the amount you want transferred.
Choose where you want your funds to go to on the “Withdraw Funds” screen.
You’ll note at the bottom of this screen it advises that “Withdrawing funds to your bank account usually takes 5-7 business days to complete, depending on your bank’s policies.” I bank with Fifth Third and I was able to access the funds the next business day. If your bank gives you access to “pending” deposits, then you should be able to use your funds earlier than the 5-7 days mentioned above. To be safe, I wouldn’t make any assumptions until after you try your first transfer and see how quickly it shows up for you.
Final Step: Reap Your Rewards
So, that’s about it! If you are a more visual/auditory learner, I’m hoping to post a video on the transfer process in the next few days and I will come back and add it in here!
If you have any comments about your experiences transferring funds on MTurk, any questions, or any requests/suggestions for future posts, be sure to make yourself heard in the comments!
Greetings Dear Readers! Today I want to discuss some of the awesome scripts that users have crafted to give you a much smoother user experience with Amazon Mechanical Turk.
As with most scripts and mods that are out there, most of these will make you wonder why the hell something similar they wasn’t included as a part of the original user interface. Some are very simple and easy to use, while others are a little more complex but will make certain aspects of your turking experience much easier. All of them are easily installed using either Scriptish or Greasemonkey (for Firefox users) or TamperMonkey (for Chrome users). As I said in the last post, a lot of credit for my knowledge on this topic goes to r/MTurk, r/HWTF, and the wider well-established community of turkers out there working away to make their and other’s experience as smooth and rewarding as possible.
I tried out something completely new for this topic! You can either go through the blog post and read about each script at your own pace and/or you can check out the little video I made that will give you the quick skinny on the scripts that I have installed. Now, this is my first time using desktop capture software or recording a video of any sort for the public so, if you have any advice or hacks you want to share with me, please do!
OK, so let’s dig in here with the first screenshot.
Three groovy scripts all in one shot!
#1 Pending HITs
This is one of the simplest scripts and is probably my favorite. I’m a history major y’all, not a mathmetician so I really don’t want to spend my time adding up all the HITs that are still pending from days or even weeks ago. In comes this handy little script that, as you can see in the screenshot below, adds a “Pending HITs” total right beneath your “Total Earnings.” When you first install the script you will likely have to click on “Pending HITs” for it to go ahead and tally up all the payments you’re still waiting on. From there on, it usually updates on its own but if you think it’s off you can just click the “Pending HITs” again and it should refresh the total.
#2 Projected Earnings For Today
Again, why the frack didn’t Amazon think to add this feature to their UI?! Sure, by each date you can see your “Earnings” listed, but that is only for the earnings that have already been approved and paid. I want to be able to see how much I’ve earned from all the HITs that I’ve completed so that I know when I need to keep pressing on or when I’ve earned enough that I can call it a day. With this script, you can see exactly that, conveniently located right beneath your handy-dandy new “Pending HITs” total.
*NOTE: #1 & #2*
Just like computers aren’t capable of performing the tasks we are being paid to do on MTurk, these scripts can’t tell what the quality of your work is. They will total up everything you have done and they will not take any rejections or bonuses in to consideration. If you are going through and carefully following the instructions and performing your work at top quality, you shouldn’t have much to worry about. A fuller consideration of rejections will be the subject of another, separate, post. (See my one little rejection there? It nearly gave me an anurysm, but I’ll let you know what’s happened since in the future rejections post.)
#3 HIT DataBase
This is one of the more complex additions for your turking experience. I’ll readily admit that I still haven’t even used all of the features very much, but the most obvious factors are the ones I am pretty familiar with so far and that’s what I’ll be focusing on. After I get a little more experience with this script, it may require a fuller update to the description here but that will be a task for another day.
The HIT DataBase keeps track of which requesters you have worked for and which tasks you have completed. By showing a series of small boxes when you are searching HITs you can see whether you’ve done a HIT with the same title or whether you’ve worked with a particular requester before.
The “R” box is the Requester box and the “T” box is the Title box.
Obviously, this is a really handy script when you’re trying frantically to accept good HITs without repeating any you’ve done before. You can see that my requester box was not lighting up properly in the above image. After toying with the load order of my scripts, however, I fixed the issue I was having where the Requester box wasn’t lighting up properly. You just need to make sure that the database script is loading first, namely before the next script we’re going to discuss. This script also has some other uses but I will save those for another post.
#4 TurkOpticon
Amazon is known for being, shall we say, “hands-off” in regards to settling disputes that arise between requesters and turkers. With that in mind, you’ve gotta keep in mind who exactly you’re working for when you accept a HIT. This is where the TurkOpticon site comes into play; using the site, turkers can report their experiences with different requesters. They can rate each requester based on their communication, their generosity (pay), the fairness of their approval process, and the swiftness with which they paid out approved hits. Going over to the site to look for requesters every time you want to do a HIT is a bit prohibitive though; enter the TO script!
This script makes TO usefulness feasible. You can also see here how my “R” boxes are lighting up properly now.
With the TO script active you can see the reviews right in your search results. Now, this script requires the Toggle Active Media Content plug-in for your browser, but you’ll find that some HITs themselves require it as well so it’s a good idea to go ahead and install whether you get the TO script or not. You can get this script at the TMAC script from the homepage of the TurkOpticon site. Another handy feature of this script is the ability to add your own reviews right from the MTurk screen as well. If you click on the “Report Your Experience…” link, you’ll be taken to the TO site to add a review.
Well guys and gals, that’s about it for this post! You can get access to all of these handy scripts from the HitsWorthTurkingFor wiki page. Several of the scripts are part of the zip file which you can download and get all the scripts to manually install them in your browser. This is the best option, at the moment, because the site which previously hosted straight to GreaseMonkey or TamperMonkey is no longer up. I will try to do a quick overview of how to do the manual installation in a separate post and I’ll come back and link it here.
For now, it’s time for me to go spend some of my hard-earned turking monies! In the next few days keep your eyes open for a post on how long it took for me to be able to transfer my funds to my bank and a little more about that process. Don’t forget to leave us some thoughts, tips, suggestions, etc. in the comments.
First off, don’t you just love how similar “turking” sounds to “twerking”? It provides so much potential for word play, while being delightfully corny. I would, at this point, have liked to share with you a funny little image involving turking/twerking but unfortunately, a Google Image search returned only very strange images rather than the glib references I was hoping for.
More importantly though, let’s get to the main task at hand here. First, I want to tell you about my experience so far using MTurk. I also want to share some of the resources I have found in the past couple days that either help answer questions or provide some good tips on turking. I think that will be a good start and then in future posts I can keep you up to date about some of the better tasks and strategies as I figure them out.
Here’s what my account is looking like after four days of twerking my turk
The screenshot above is of my MTurk “Dashboard” which gives you an overview of how much you’ve earned total, breaks down your activity by day, and shows you your total hit stats. As you can see in the upper left-hand portion, I’ve earned just over $40. This total represents the number of HITs that have been approved and paid out. You’ll see I’ve also received “Bonuses” which are offered on some tasks based on anything from productivity to luck. It is important to note that despite the “Transfer Earnings” link below my available earnings section, located in the upper right, you can not transfer earning until you have worked on the site for 10 days. Now,I have read that you have to do 3+ hits a day for 10 consecutive days or that you just have to do 10 days of activity total that do not have to be sequential. I’ll see when I’m able to transfer mine and let you all know which of these seems more accurate.
If you look at the “Your HIT Status” section, you’ll see I still have 13 HITs that are pending. The pending items have been neither approved nor rejected and have not been paid out. Most of the ones that have not been approved yet are fairly good paying ones, so I’m probably sitting closer to $45 in reality. Clearly, my first day I went balls to the wall and did pretty well at about 20 bucks. Yesterday and today, on the other hand, I haven’t had as much time to focus and really dig in.
Despite not making as much money on Saturday, I did accomplish another important thing to keep in mind. I did about 30-40 HITs that paid $.05 each to increase my total HIT count. You will find that to qualify for many jobs you need to have completed least 100 HITs, but more often 500, 1000, or even 5000. This is how a requester can tell that you are taking your MTurk work seriously and you do enough quality work that the risk of you screwing up their survey/research/whatever is justifiably low. The higher total gives you a higher status, in a sense, so that you are also eligible for better work. As you can see, I am close to reaching my first milestone, 100, and if I hadn’t done that batch of lower paying HITs I would be much further away from that total. (For some more info on this and other tips for MTurk, check out this useful reddit post: “LEVELING UP! (basic things to make more money–for noobs/intermediates)“)
As far as the content of the HITs I’ve been doing, I’ve tried to just stay open to whatever pops up. Some of my favorites tasks so far have been one that involved participating in an activity with other turkers and betting on which choices the group would make; this task took a little while but it gave a few dollars as a base pay and I won close to $4. Today I did a task for just under a dollar that involved using my webcam to record images of myself speaking while making certain head movements that was pretty silly and fun; the requester of this HIT is trying to improve technology’s ability to recognize human speech and emotions so that the computers can one day laugh at our cries of fear and dissatisfaction, or whatever.
I am still trying to get better at transcribing, I even filed my nails down today so I can maximize typing speed as much as possible. As of yesterday, it took me about 50 minutes from the time I accepted a hit, downloaded the audio, did the actual transcription, and then submitted it. At under $1.50 for this length of audio, it’s not exactly the best rate per hour, but if I can get faster and do some of the longer jobs then I could avoid surfing the site all day and just spend several hours doing a big job that will pay $15-30. Over the past few days all the transcription jobs I’ve done have been for the same video tutorial client. I feel like this made the later jobs a little easier because I knew how the lessons flowed, what sort of technical terms would be used, and was familiar with the speaker’s voice.
To wrap up this post I would like to propose my first theory on MTurk work. I’ve surfed around the site looking for work on two workdays and two weekend days. I definitely focused more and devoted more time on the weekdays, but at the same time I think there was also better paying work on those days. I found fewer $1-$2+ surveys or jobs during the weekend, which makes sense. Likely there are more people logging in to do a little down-time turking on the weekends so the good jobs are probably snapped up quicker.
So far reddit has been the best source for me as far as info and advice. Check out these sites for some good starting points:
r/HitsWorthTurkingFor – This subreddit lists mostly quick and easy HITs that come from well rated requesters. The site will also filter which posted HITs are already dead.
r/mturk – A subreddit for general MTurk info and discussion. You can find tips and tricks as well as potential requesters to avoid and other useful info.
In the next post I will talk about rejected HITs and some of the add-ons you can use to improve your turking experience. As always, comments and advice are welcome!
KHM
I sit right there on the nice little cushion while turking.
What’s an unemployed graduate student to do over the summer?
With temporarily limited transportation options and a strong drive to limit the amount of contact with the sticky Southern heat, the most obvious choice is work done from the comfort of my own (air-conditioned) abode. Enter freelance work.
First, I want to address the word “freelance.” I think when a lot of people use this f-word they are often talking about the freelance work of a more simple time; writing articles for small newspapers and magazines and hoping to move up along the ranks towards a more stable professional writing career. While that sounds groovy, I’m mostly aiming for something more temporary and fleeting. I will be throwing “freelance” around to cover, basically, any kind of writing/clerical/survey/etc. task that I can get paid to do on the internet. Sadly, for my wallet that is, this will generally exclude anything involving webcams, chat rooms, and/or genitalia. (Incidentally, an “Adult” Freelance blog sounds like it would be fascinating; I would imagine there are so many more types of work out there than we would even imagine and they would all provide entertaining blog fodder. If you’re so inclined for that sort of work, I say go for it; if you feel you can take advantage of routes that allow you to make some coin while enacting your own sexual agency, more power to you. As for me, however, I’m sticking with a more vanilla route. At least until the grad school bills start rolling in…)
Thanks, you’re too sweet!
So, where to start? I have been reading up about different freelancing opportunities for writers online for about six months. Over the spring, however, I was keeping a blog for one class and reading 100+ student blogs for grading every month, so that didn’t leave much time for experimentation. I did start an Examiner.com account and post a few articles on there. It’s definitely good practice for writing for a wider (read: non-academic) audience, but the $.45 I’ve earned so far is a little underwhelming. Of course Examiner pays on a per post, per views, per subscriber, etc. pyramid so, to really make money at it, you need to be writing one or more articles per day. This is probably why my rate of 1/month is proving less than fruitful.
While I haven’t completely written off Examiner, I need something more immediate, more customizable, and more productive at the moment. Along with this blog, which is a joint project and product in and of itself, I’m starting out with one of the most direct routes to getting some freelance coin (literally coins, often times): Amazon Mechanical Turk – Artificial Artificial Intelligence.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a crowdsource platform for the tasks that our future computer overlords have not yet been able to master. There are a wide variety of tasks and potential payouts available through the site. I say it is one of the most direct routes you can take because after you are signed up, you can start immediately doing Human Intelligence Tasks (HITS). The HITS start out at $.01 for tasks like identifying products on receipts. Some of these smaller hits, like the ones typing words from receipts, will pay you bonuses depending on your accuracy. Other tasks will pay you anywhere from a $1 to $20+, but the price generally reflects the level of time you are going to have to put into the tasks.
So far, I’ve been plucking away as a Turker (that’s the lingo the kids are using, of course) for about two days. My earnings are at around $30. I’ve tried to do a variety of tasks with a variety of pay scales to start to get an idea of what is worth pursuing and what is just too much effort. For the next few days I am going to continue trying different HITS and then I’ll begin sharing some of my thoughts with you all on what is working for me and what is more of a flop. Speaking of flops, why are there so many $0.00 HITS? Is this some kind of secret I’m as of yet unaware of? If you know the answer to this mystery or you have Turk experience and want to share some advice, leave a comment below!
Cheers,
KHM
This will be me in a few days, y’all, writing to tell you about all the money I’m bringing in with these $.01 HITS!
Felicitous Freelancing 