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Make money with Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk is described on their own website as “… a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually.”

In other words, there are still tons of mechanical tasks that companies need to get done but that cannot be done by machines, at least not yet, not properly or not in a cost-effective way. These are tasks that don’t necessarily require any particular skill, yet only humans can complete them successfully. If you are wondering what tasks might fall under the mentioned description here are some of the most common ones:

  • Answering surveys – A computer can’t answer a survey.
  • Document or audio transcription – A computer can make a lot of mistakes if the source file is not perfectly printed/scanned.
  • Data validation – A computer can easily validate an email, but it can have a hard time validating more complex data.
  • Quality control – A computer can have a hard time figuring if an image or video has a good quality or not.
  • Product description – A computer can’t look at an image and describe it.

With Amazon Mechanical Turk companies have the opportunity to list tasks like these and have hundreds, or even thousands of workers around the globe complete them quickly as opposed to having to hire a dedicated in-house team or a third-party company.

Most tasks you’ll find on Amazon Mechanical Turk will only take you 10-15 minutes to complete, with a few requiring up to 60 minutes. The beauty of this platform is there are not minimums or commitments of any kind, so you can take on as many or as few tasks as you wish.

How much money can you make with Amazon Mechanical Turk?

The tasks you’ll find on Amazon Mechanical Turk will usually offer a compensation of cents, with some others offering a few dollars and very very few offering more than $10 per task.

Some tasks will also screen candidates based on criteria such as your geographical location or your approval rate (how many tasks you’ve completed successfully before). This means you might not always be eligible for the higher paying tasks if you live in a non-English-speaking country for example, but you’ll definitely see the tasks catalog grow and improve as you complete your initial tasks successfully.

With all this in mind we’ve run some experiments on the platform and have managed to earn $6 to $8 an hour for US based accounts and $2.5 to $5 for Europe based accounts.

Based on this hourly average, if you were to spend 1 hour per day working on Amazon Mechanical Turk, Monday to Friday, you could expect to make:

  • $140 per month in the US.
  • $75 per month in Europe.

Or if you have more time to put into it, well you can easily do the math 😉

Things to consider

Amazon Mechanical Turk might not have the best paying jobs out there, but it is truly one of the easiest ways to get started if you want to make some extra cash.

Other side hustles might require you to create an account, setup a profile, upload content or even make stuff… with Amazon Mechanical Turk you just need to request an invite with your existing Amazon account. Once you receive the invitation the tasks will already be there waiting for you to pick them up and complete them. After you account is activated you can literally start making money in ten minutes.

Another great thing about Amazon Mechanical Turk is the flexibility it offers. You can complete as many tasks as you want, from wherever in the world you want, the days you feel like doing so. This of course makes it a great option for digital nomads, but it also means you can probably integrate an hour a day working on the platform into your daily routine without disrupting your schedule too much. You can pick up a few tasks here and there during lunch break, while waiting for the laundry to be done or whenever you find yourself with some time to kill.