Source It Baby! Pt. 2 – To the Brink of Failure and Back (Maybe)

Greetings dear readers!

First, I apologize for the delayed timing of this continued review. I’ve had some kind of lingering illness and malaise for the past week or so. I will generously and unfairly blame my writing partner here at this blog, since I started getting sick after a night of booze and heated intellectual discussion with him. I am back to feeling mostly normal again and I’ve finally worked up a video to further discuss my experience at Crowdsource and share some of the do’s and don’ts I’ve learned the hard way so far.

*WARNING* The video above is a bit long and a bit rambling, but there are several different aspects of the Crowdsource experience I thought you all would like to hear about and I did a bit of improvising as far as the structure. I’ll go over the main points here in a somewhat more logical way, if you prefer some silly logic over off-the-cuff rambling.

Check Out the Forum

You’ll find the forums for current and prospective workers at http://forum.crowdsource.com . You can find a lot of helpful information on the forums pertaining to specific tasks or specific issues that people are commonly encountering. You can also find a bit of off-putting discussion about the many issues workers have with the current tiered system. I have to admit that if I had viewed the forums before joining the site, I might not have bothered with it. What you need to keep in mind, however, is that the forum is mostly composed of the most serious workers who take their writer level and their tasks very seriously. These writers are not only venting, but also trying to offer constructive criticisms for what is, apparently, quite a new system of leveling and tiered work. But, as I said, in addition to all of this meta discussion there is a lot of helpful info and advice about the specific tasks and AP style preferences and the like. Speaking of AP style and the tiered system takes us to the next section of discussion.

Pass/Fail Trials and Tribulations

So, if you remember in my first video I breezed right on through a large chunk of questions in a greedy grab for bonuses and payouts. Well, dear readers, don’t make this mistake. The site is pretty stringent when it comes to properly following AP style and the specific task Style Guides. Go ahead and do a few tasks at first, then wait for your feedback to see if there are any mistakes you are making throughout. You need to get used to the preferred style and tone of the answers before you go diving off the deep end, like I did. My numbers very nearly dropped to below the required 60% pass rate required to continue writing because of mostly small mistakes that I could have avoided by doing a few test runs first. The good news is that you still get paid for questions you fail!

You might be thinking, as I did, “What? They pay me for sucking?!” Well, yes. I think this is one of the more confusing aspects of the tiered system as it stands. Currently, if your work requires few edits then you pass and your passes count towards advancing through the levels. If you fail, you get paid but you fall down the ladder towards potentially not being able to write any further answers. Of course, this system is set up to weed out those who are doing shoddy work consistently and have no business writing for the site. In my opinion, however, I think there should be three levels instead. If you do horribly, plagiarize, write a bunch of nonsense, and the work is unusable without substantial edits then you should fail without pay. If your work can still be used but requires a fair number of edits and corrections, you should pass but should not advance towards higher level jobs. If you do very well, your answer requires little edits and follows the rules with precision and style then you should be advanced towards the higher levels. Now, as I mentioned above, this system is fairly new and they are still trying to work out the kinks and get it to a level that the good writers are satisfied with so we’ll just have to stay tuned on this issue. For now, keep in mind that to advance AND to keep writing at all, you need to be very cautious with your writing.

Where the Money At?

I was actually pleasantly surprised with the payout structure of the site. The waiting game starts after you submit your answers and must wait for an editor to come along and review your work. The 100-word answers seem to take quite a long time to get reviewed most of the time. I still have several from the first few days that have not been reviewed yet. From what I understand, this stems from the fact that many of the new or inexperienced users are answering these questions and the editors hate having to go through and heavily edit these. Despite this fact, the large majority of my tasks have been approved in a pretty timely manner. Once your work is reviewed, you will see the amount earned in the “Owed” column. The day after your work is reviewed, Crowdsource will transfer the money right into your Paypal account. *(I assume this is the same if you are working through MTurk or another platform, but I can’t be positive since I’m hooked up only through my Paypal account.) This means that fairly regularly your work will be reviewed and your pay will be in your Paypal account within a few days, not bad! So far I’ve made over $100 which is about 1/3 of my total MTurk earnings over a much larger period of time.

Support Me

Another important aspect of the platform that I did not discuss in the first video if the Support system. If you have any questions or concerns you can go to http://support.crowdsource.com/support/home and file a new support ticket. Now, for both the support site and the forum site, you will have to create an account. Just use the same info you used to create your main account. I’m guessing it is set up this way because of the various platforms that can be used to access the actual work, necessitating separate accounts for CrowdSource specific services. Anyway, once you get set up filing a new ticket and checking on it is pretty intuitive. You’ll get an email whenever a CSR has responded so you don’t have to keep watching the site. You will get to see a friendly face and name with your response, so it feels quite personable and not like some kind of auto-generated response. If you encounter some fails you feel are unjustified for one reason or another, make sure to file a ticket to not only try to get it overturned, but also to make the employees aware of potentially unfair editors/the potential unfairness of the system as it currently stands.

I think that’s pretty much about it for now. If you have any other questions you want answered before diving in, make sure to leave a comment and let me know! Also, if you know of similar sites I would LOVE to know about them! I’m having a hard time going back to the MTurk grind after the higher pay and entertainment value of CrowdSource, so I would love to know about some other simple freelance writing sites that do not involve bidding on projects and the like. If you know of any other sites for earning a little extra cash, writing based or not, let me know and I’ll have a look and try to do a review of them!

Cheers,

KHM

Source It Baby! – Pt. 1- Starting Out With CrowdSource

So, I started my CrowdSource journey today and so far I am pretty pleased! I worked up a quick video discussing the site, their bonus system, and my initial impressions. Check it out below:

The reason I am a history major and why I toyed around with the idea of becoming a librarian is that I really enjoying researching things, being able to answer people’s questions, and to drop knowledge on y’all. In this way, CrowdSource is perfect for me! I first did a few questions that took me a while to research and try to find the perfect answer and then….I noticed all the Pokémon questions. Aw yis, here we go, something I already knew answers to and knew just where to go to find the sources to back up my knowledge.

I will now be making my livelihood telling people what Shiny Pokemon are.

I will now be making my livelihood telling people what Shiny Pokémon are.

 I did a total of 15 jobs today, for a pending total of over $40 with the first bonus, and I’m going to wait and see what kind of feedback I get before I do some more. I’ll be keeping you all updated and let you know how the approval process goes, how stable the question pool is, and any other quirks of the site that I encounter along the way. As always, feel free to leave any comments or suggestions here or on the YouTube video! I’m always eager to try out some new sites too, so if you know of any places that I could check out and review then do leave those below!

Cheers,

KHM

 

Turking Like You Mean It – Vacation Intermission

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!

Cheers,

KHM

Turking Like You Mean It – Ep. 1

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.

Turk Funds

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.