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Review of Amazon MTURK After Working With Them As A Worker For a Few Months

Hi!

The present post is in the personal category and is not related to computers at all. I know this fact and am writing it as this post shares my experiences of working with Amazon’s mturk.com as a Worker for completing the HIT’s (Human Intelligent Task).


There are thousands of users who are working online and some are making no money, some very less and some a lot. If I have to give a title to this post (I am not going to change it now) as per my blog title (pctipstricks.com), then I could have written it as: Tips For Earning  $ 8-15 A Day By Slogging Few Hours Doing Most Of The Tasks For Cents – Courtesy “Amazon MTURK”.

I have stopped even signing at MTURK from December, 2008  after having very bitter experiences with their Requesters (Individuals or companies posting the assignments).

Few reasons, why I have stopped working part time at MTURK (http://www.mturk.com) are:

Very Low Pay Rates

The pay rates for almost all the HITS were very low, i.e.,  – $ 1 to $ 3 per hour (there can be some exceptions sometimes but the payments are normally in this range). Even the writing rates most of the times for articles of 500 words is $ 4, $1 for 100 words and similar ones. They call the assignment posted by their Requester as HIT’s (Human Intelligence Task). So, is the human intelligence worth cents only? LOL! I know no one is forcing anyone to do these assignments but yet it doesn’t justify the usage of word “intelligence” – a mockery of human brain.

MTURK is not all bothered about the low pay rates of the HITS as it doesn’t effect their commissions.

Requester is treated as a Boss and Worker as a Beggar

I know that I am making a harsh statement but it actually happened few times with me. My genuine hard work was rejected for reasons that I either never came to know or were purely Non Sense – intended to save money to the Requesters!

I always paid closed attention to the instructions and quality of work and did the assignments honestly (despite low rates). Once, it happened that one of my article written by me after good research was rejected as being plagiarized. Well, I had written about 20 articles in total for the same Requester (Affiliated Services) of 500 words for D10 each (exception in the rates for this one as the normal rate is $ 5 per 500 words at mturk) and 19 of them were approved and one rejected.

Well, I had written all the 20 articles myself and had not done any copy and paste from anywhere. After checking my article for plagiarism through software (though I never did it earlier as I never felt the need to do so because I had written all the articles on paper  and then typed them), I challenged the Requester to prove that it was plagiarized and well as expected, he never replied back.

Amazon’s Customer Support told me that they can’t do anything as they had received their commissions and what I can do is to keep writing to the Requester through their contact form, hoping he will reply with some idiotic reason.

To give more clarity about the HITS done by me, I have done more than 10,000 HITS for MTURK Requesters in last one year and my approval rate is 98.2%. A screenshot from my account is shown:

Rajesh Mago Amazon Mturk.com proof of Earnings and HITSProof that I have really done HITS at mturk.com

There were other instances also, where I asked the Requesters to kindly let me know the reasons for rejecting my work and I either didn’t get any reply or non sense reasons which were clearing indicating that they had policy of rejecting 20% of HITS irrespective of the type of work. These Requesters were:

- Steve (rejected SEO HIT without checking if his instructions are clear and ok)

- Todd Dickerson (rejected rewording HIT, the reason only best known to him as he never replied with what I had done wrong)

- Dancing Mammoth, (couldn’t complete some of the HITS as the site frame opened in a non MTURK window and there was no way of submitting or returning the HIT – a fault at his end)

- JCV (Research related HIT, didn’t let me know the reason for rejection)

- Affiliated Services (for rejecting the article written by me on “Business Consultant” as plagiarized. Never replied how he had declared it as plagiarized)

- Kimberly L Calvey (Rejected research HIT of $ 63 of finding the seller of Vespa 1948 model. He had asked for one contact, I gave him about ten. He left MTURK after rejecting the HIT and emails sent to him bounced, Pretty smart guy!)

I had the proofs of completed work for some of the HITS and challenged the Requesters to prove that the reasons for rejecting the HITS were genuine. I never got any reply from them; MTURK Customer Support clearly told me that they don’t have policy of making sure that a hard working genuine worker is paid for his/her work.

They were only bothered to get their commissions and can’t do anything even if the Requester even doesn’t respond or give a nonsense reason.

Also, a Requester has the right to block a Worker from doing his/her HITS but a Worker can’t do anything even if his work done 100% as per the given instructions is rejected without giving any reasons or absurd comments.

MTURK on one hand says that they have the policy of not interfering between the Requester and the Worker then why the hell have they given rights to Requester to block a Worker and no power to Worker even if he/she is 100% confident of his/her rejected work done properly as per the instructions.

I was shocked when one Requester blocked me after I did one of his HIT and he found it wrong. MTURK immediately sent me a threatening mail that I must pay attention to my quality of work (98.2% approval rate) otherwise they will suspend my account. Disgusting or not?

Well they never threatened any of the Requesters who rejected my properly completed HITS (despite challenging them to prove the HIT was done wrongly) and even didn’t bother to provide any explanation.

MTURK is a perfect place for Requesters to get anything done for almost Free; They only have to pay very small commission to MTURK and there are no problems if Worker is not paid (Who cares except the Worker?). The tactic is – Reject Worker HIT even if he/she has done the perfect work to save money, Smart! Isn’t it? What can a worker do? Nothing!!!!!

With thousands of workers at mturk.com, things are not effected at all for the cheating Requester. There are lot of other helpless workers who will do the work for the same fraud Requester hoping that the Requester will pay and they don’t get payments or only partial payments.  MTURK is full of dishonest Requesters who first post the HITS for really bottom low rates and then don’t pay even if the work is correct.

WAKE UP MTURK !!!!!, Stop this injustice to the Workers otherwise your site will only have Requesters!

Delayed Payments to Indian Users, Payment Only Sent Through Cheques

MTURK doesn’t pay Indian users through paypal due to the reasons best known to them. As per their policy, an Indian user can only complaint after two months after a dispatched cheque is not received.

USA Workers working for MTURK have the option to get paid through bank transfers but not Indian users (Indian users are not even paid by paypal or any other payment processor).

Some of my Mturk’s payment cheques came after one month and some after 14 days. The reason for difference of 14 days in receiving the cheque never got cleared to me.

I am highly pissed off with AMAZON MTURK and have decided to not even sign in unless they improve  their  – pay rates, policies of exploiting the workers (Requester rejecting the HITS without any reason/absurd reason and non relevant comments) and payments (through paypal instead of sending the cheques that are sent by cycle or bullock carts and received after 15 -30 days).

I will check them out if they send me an email with the above listed improvements that I need at their end. Well, I am confident that it will  never happen!

If the above reasons don’t upset you at all and you are interested in working at $ 1-3 per hour, then please start working for MTURK Requesters at: http://www.mturk.com

My sincere thanks to Requesters who have always paid me on time and approved my hundreds of HITS without doing any cheating at all despite knowing that a poor Worker can’t do anything even if his/her honest hard work is rejected. MTURK would be a nicer place if the pay rates are improved (at least $4-5 per hour, $ 0.05 minimum per HIT- no $0.01 HITS), Requesters who do cheating (by not paying for the correct work) are challenged and removed after being proved of cheating, Requesters are held accountable for rejecting the HIT and replying and the payments for Indian workers are processed faster (paid by paypal).

Is MTURK listening? (I have already sent them feedback many times)

Until these reforms happened, it’s good bye to MTURK. The best concept that I like at MTURK was that the Worker doesn’t have to do correspondence for getting work, post his/her CV and give references etc. and there is no bidding. The worker can login, see the assignments and decided if he/she wants to do it. If you can do the work, you are welcome. But for almost all of the HITS (leaving the writing HITS), you really need to have a fast Internet broadband connection as there are other workers who are competing with you to get the work and the faster one wins!


On the more positive note, I really felt good when I received a mug and an appreciation letter from MTURK on their 3rd anniversary. However, it doesn’t affect my decision of not working for them part time due to the above listed reasons; I don’t want to get harassed again as I am hard working, intelligent and can make a lot from other sources.

Some pictures of the received payment cheque, mug and appreciation letter received from Amazon MTURK are shown. It feels good to be appreciated for nice work but it hurts when the Requesters reject the correct low paid work and then don’t reply also.

One of my payment cheque received from Amazon MTURK

One of my payment cheque received from Amazon’s MTURK.com (My address removed for privacy reasons)

Blue mug received by me from Amazon MTURK on their 3rd anniversary

Appreciation letter from Amazon MTURK

By quitting MTURK, I am happy as I have found new sources of income by devoting the same 1-2 hours per day that I was otherwise spending at MTURK working for very low pay rates.

Mturking was kind of addictive as I always challenged myself to test and experiment and work for low paying HITS thinking that I will be able to make decent money. But, MTURK Requesters are pretty smart, they had done more R&D than me and were sure that they would get the work done at the lowest rates (their main reason for coming at MTURK) or for Free!

What are your experiences of MTURK? Please share. Am I the only one having more negative experiences?  Are there any friends of mine who are happy working at MTURK? Is decent money making possible at MTURK? From my experience of about one year, I am sure that nice money making is not at all possible at MTURK but I would be happy to be proven wrong.

Anyway, I wish All the best to MTURK and MTURKERS!

Take care,

Rajesh Mago

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Posted in: Advice, Personal

Tags: how is mturk, mturk.com – make cents online, my feedback of mturk.com, my honest comments of mturk.com, my mturk.com experiences, my review of Amazon's mturk.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 13th, 2008 at 5:09 am and is filed under Advice, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

96 Responses to “Review of Amazon MTURK After Working With Them As A Worker For a Few Months”

Sandhanamurugan.R January 22nd, 2009 at 12:30 am

Sir, I’ll try to create new a/c to mturk. but a/c cann’t create. “how to create MTURK new a/c from INDIA”

rajeshmago January 22nd, 2009 at 12:37 am

@Sandhanamurugan.R:

- Copy and paste the given below URL in your Internet browser and press Enter or right click on the hyperlink and click on open in new tab or window etc. (depending on your Internet browser)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/ssop/index.html?awscbctx=&awscbid=urn%3Aaws%3Asid%3A027Y0TCSPRG5XHFYJSR2&awscredential=&awsstrict=false&awsturknosubway=true&wa=wsignin1.0&wctx=&wreply=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mturk.com%3A443%2Fmturk%2Fendsignin&wtrealm=urn%3Aaws%3Asid%3A027Y0TCSPRG5XHFYJSR2&awssig=kPMMofzaVawBNtHDP%2Bto2FwPvow%3D

- Click on the first radio button – “I am a New user” (don’t enter any email address) and then click on “Sign in using our secure server”

- A new screen will appear with the URL: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/ssop/index.html. Enter your details and proceed further.

After successful registration, you will automatically get logged in. You can work on the HITS right now but for receiving payment, you will have to send some ID proof of yours.

Please check as I register more than an year back to confirm if any terms/policies have changed. I had at that time sent the scanned copy of my PAN card by email.

And, yes after you Sign out, you will have to use your registered email address and password to login. Explore more to find out the details to be entered, specially the Account settings and the FAQ etc.

If you need more help, let me know.

I have not been a very happy worker at mturk as obvious from the above post of mine but anyway I would be glad if it works for you.

All the best!

Regards,

Rajesh Mago

nithin January 22nd, 2009 at 11:16 am

brother you really did hardwork at mturk and earned good money. I am new to mturk and want to earn some money. Can you give me suggestions please?

rajeshmago January 23rd, 2009 at 12:02 am

@nithin: Hello!

I am amazed that despite my negative review of mturk.com, people are still getting encouraged to work there.

Ok, coming to your point of my hard work and making good money from mturk, I would say that yes I did quite good amount of efforts to earn money by devoting my 1-2 hours on average per day but wasn’t satisfied with the work environment at mturk (my post clearly shows the same) and the money too. You must be joking that I earned good money at mturk, $ 2-5 per hour is very low wage as per any standards. Plus, don’t forget that there is no guarantee of any payments from the Requesters even after doing the work 100% correctly. Most of them would even not reply when you inquire what you did wrong. Isn’t it discouraging?

My suggestion to you would be to do some real world (offline) part time job instead of mturking. You would definitely earn more as compared to working at mturk. Try it and if you still want to work at mturk due to some issues, let me know your skills and I will give you the suggestions accordingly.

I wish you all the best!

jack January 26th, 2009 at 5:04 am

When will amazon will pay money. I mean in google adsense the money will be paid after reaching $100.
Can you please tell me when I will be get paid in amazon…….

rajeshmago January 27th, 2009 at 2:21 am

@jack: Hello!

Amazon MTURK used to pay me by cheque (me being an Indian worker) after deducting $ 4 from my withdrawl (their additional commission on cheque). When I had started working, I did my first withdrawl after I had $ 15 or so in my MTURK Amazon payment account to check if they pay.

My future withdrawls were always more than $ 50 since I had to always pay $ 4 commission per withdrawl to MTURK.

I always got paid in 3 weeks or sometimes more (including the amount credit time).

According to me, you can always withdraw after you have $ 5 or more in your Amazon MTURK account

But, please confirm their payment policy by using following “Contact Us” link taken from their site (their payment policy may vary according to the country where the worker is residing):

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/contactus

All the best,

Rajesh Mago

Srinivas January 28th, 2009 at 7:31 am

Hi,

I have not received my cheque from Amazon Mturk which is of amount $75,after waiting 2 months,i have contacted them,they said it is failed in delivery,and they reissued the cheque,few days back i got confirmation mail saying that my cheque,got issued,but the exchange rate for INDIAN rupees email which usually we get after first mail,have not got till today as it is alreay been one week,since i got confirmation of reissue of cheque?therefore i got doubt second time it is failed conversion of INDIAN rupees itself?

How do we get our cheque of INDIAN RUPEES,is it by courier or registered post?

rajeshmago January 28th, 2009 at 8:43 am

@Srinivas:

Hi!

I am really sad to know that you didn’t receive your $ 75 cheque from MTURK in two months period.

First your query of receiving the cheque – All the cheques that I received from MTURK were sent by normal international post from Singapore that were delivered by my postman (no courier or registered post).

It’s not clear from your comment whether it was yours first payment or later payment. Assuming it was yours first payment that you didn’t receive in 2 months plus you have not received the email confirming the dispatch of fresh new cheque in 1 week, I would advise you to do/check the following:

i). It can happen that your address in Mturk’s record is not complete and thus you didn’t get the cheque. To take care of this, do as given next:

Login to your Mturk account and click on Account Settings –> Add, edit, or delete your bank account information (click) –> Login to Amazon payments and check the Step 4, i.e., Select the billing address for this bank account.

If your address is not shown complete in Step 4, then either Edit,

Or

“Delete it and enter new one”. Now, again check if the address is correct and complete in Step 4.

This first step would ensure that the cheque by Amazon Mturk was/is sent at the correct address.

It happened with me in the starting days of mturking that even after entering the address correctly in Mturk, my address field of City – New Delhi was not getting updated in the Step 4. I still managed to get the cheque without city as the pin code was there.

ii). For handling the issue of not getting the new cheque dispatch email from Mturk, contact their Customer Support (CS) and let them know the same. I remember getting the email always in 2-3 days after requesting a withdrawl.

The MTURK CS should definitely reply to you in 2-3 days.

iii). Inquire in general from your postman regarding the previous cheque. I know that now it must have been cancelled by MTURK but yet let him know that it was sent from Singapore by normal post and you didn’t receive it (I here assume that yours address in MTURK record was fine when they sent yours first payment cheque).

Also, Indian Postal system doesn’t guarantee the delivery of normal post so you will have to request your postman to take care of delivering your payment cheque. I hope that you got the clue :)

From my experience, I don’t see any reason why you would not get the payment from MTURK.

I hope that my tips would definitely help you in getting yours $ 75 payment. Let me know if these were of any help to you.

All the best!

Rajesh Mago

vazrakar February 4th, 2009 at 4:39 am

how can i change my payment address at mturk

rajeshmago February 4th, 2009 at 9:30 am

@vazrakar: Hi!

The answer to your query of changing the payment address in Mturk was already given in my reply to Srinivas. Kindly do the following (writing in more detail now):

Login to your Mturk account and right click on Account Settings (Click on Open Link in New Tab/Window option of your browser) –> In the new window, click on “Add, edit, or delete your bank account information” –> Sign In…. to yours Amazon.com account (Is different from your Mturk account) and go to Step 4, i.e., “Select the billing address for this bank account:” Edit the address by clicking on “Edit” and then complete the steps that appear. You should not have any problems to edit a US address.

But, I noticed that while editing an existing Indian address with pin code, the state that appeared after clicking on Edit was of US and thus there was Zip code error on clicking on Continue (All the states that appear by default were of US and not of India even if one had entered the Indian state earlier at the time of new registration). So, I deleted the Indian address by clicking on Delete and signed out of the Amazon.com window (of address).

I now also signed out from Mturk and then logged in again. Now as soon as I signed in, I got a message that my address is not there in Mturk’s records. Now I filled the address form – Country, Full Name, Address Line 1, Address Line 2, City, State, Postal Code and Phone number and clicked on Continue. There were no errors now as I had the option of typing all the fields and selecting the right country.

To verify that the new address in Mturk is fine, I logged out and then logged in again to Mturk, right clicked on Account Settings (I use Firefox browser) and then clicked on “Open Link in New Tab”. In the window that appeared, I clicked on “Add, edit, or delete your bank account information”. I now signed in to Amazon.com and in Step 4 found that my billing address is perfectly fine (No US state appearing in it). The Country “India” didn’t appear there but I know from my experience that the payment envelope sent by Mturk had India printed in the last (It’s taken from the Country field selected by the user at the time of fresh address registration).

If you followed the above steps (being an Indian user at Mturk) and found your address correct at last, then you can Sign Out from the Amazon.com window. The main Mturk window in the previous tab/window will still be there and you will have to click on Sign Out to log out of Mturk.

That’s all for editing US and Indian workers payment addresses at Mturk. To write the above steps correctly, I had to delete my correct address in Amazon and enter it again. No problems but I am writing it to let you know that these steps have been tested by me and they are right as per the present Mturk’s address changing procedure.

I am sure that these details would definitely help some of my friends :) Mturk Customer Support must be smiling after seeing the detailed procedure that I am giving here to help Mturk users on their behalf ;)

Take care!

Srinivas February 4th, 2009 at 10:11 am

Hi All,
Finally I received today my 75$ cheque from mturk.Ok,let me deposit this cheque cash out.I want to thank Rajesh for giving quick reply for questions asked him.

rajeshmago February 4th, 2009 at 1:25 pm

@Srinivas: Hello! Nice to know that you finally got your payment from Mturk. Congrats!

May you prosper and earn fatter cheques/loads of money from your efforts.

mahipal singh rawat February 10th, 2009 at 12:35 pm

Hi all,
I am lucky enough to earn around 20000 last month from mturk.But as Rajesh said the payment is really low.I just wanted from Rajesh himself is there any genuine site which offers better tasks than mturk even if there is some joining fees!

rajeshmago February 10th, 2009 at 8:44 pm

@mahipal singh rawat: Great to know that you earned INR 20000 last month from Mturk! Now it’s a secret for me! My earnings were never so great at Mturk even if I tried my best to make money by choosing the best projects and working for whole day/s. I could never find good paying work for me.

Has Mturk improved? Or, I think you must have done writing and transcription projects by slogging hard every day. Congrats!

I have searched Internet for years for work from home jobs (for Indians) but I am sorry that I have still to find the same.

There are sites that may work for Americans (http://www.homejobstop.com and http://www.telecommute-jobs.com/) as per my research but I can’t recommend them with 100% confidence as I have not tried and tested them. I have also read US people finding work from US Craigslist sites but in my case, I have not found any genuine work from any of the Craigslist sites after sending hundreds of applications. The only thing that I started receiving more after responding to Craigslist ads was spam!

Whatever money I am making presently is from offline – tutoring and writing- assignments.

I am still trying Blogging and Affiliate Marketing and yes they are genuine opportunities for making money. But, there is competition and struggle and I am working hard to make money from them.

In case, I come to know any genuine work from home site (for Indians), I would let you know the same here and request you to do the same too.

Take care,

Rajesh Mago

Sridar February 12th, 2009 at 6:53 am

i have earned some money in mturk.. should our full address be in the address line 1 or it should be spitted…im really confused .It will be a great help if you let me know.. me too tired of mturk after getting this payment im going to stop working for mturk at the mean time please let us know the other ways to earn online

rajeshmago February 12th, 2009 at 12:17 pm

@Sridar: Hi! Your address in Mturk should appear logical and should be split on separate lines so that it makes sense. Example: Name, House No., Street/Locality/Colony, City, State and Country. You will have to see how you can use the fields provided by Mturk to fit your address taking care that it is sufficient enough for the govt. postman to deliver the cheque to you :)

Please go through the detailed comments posted above to see how an Indian address can to be re-entered again in case it’s incorrect (Deleting the wrong address by clicking on Delete, logging out of both Amazon payments and Mturk, logging again in Mturk and then entering the address details in the respective fields of the address form shown automatically by Mturk).

I am sorry that after working on Internet for so many years, I still don’t know any free site that offers genuine work from home jobs to Indians. As soon as I come to know about the same, I will post it here. Writing, blogging, researching, virtual assistant service, e-tutoring, forum posting, programming, web design and affiliate marketing etc. are other ways to earn online. Blogging, writing and affiliate marketing are some of the money making ways that I am trying besides doing offline work.

Hope that you get your Mturk payment at the earliest.

Sridar February 12th, 2009 at 10:33 pm

i). It can happen that your address in Mturk’s record is not complete and thus you didn’t get the cheque. To take care of this, do as given next:

Login to your Mturk account and click on Account Settings –> Add, edit, or delete your bank account information (click) –> Login to Amazon payments and check the Step 4, i.e., Select the billing address for this bank account.

If your address is not shown complete in Step 4, then either Edit,

Or

“Delete it and enter new one”. Now, again check if the address is correct and complete in Step 4.

I COULDNT update my address when i try to edit it .its displaying error as invalid zip code…. and i think that bank option is only for us residents na :O

rajeshmago February 12th, 2009 at 10:56 pm

@Sridar: May I request you to go through my answer to the same query in comment 10 of this post (reply to Vazrakar). In short, delete your Indian address by clicking on delete in amazonpayments, logout of amazonpayments and mturk, login to mturk and you will get a Form to enter the new address along with Indian pin code of 6 digits .

It’s a bug in amazonpayments that there is no provision of editing an existing Indian address (Indian state and pin code fields are not displayed). The state (only US ones) and zip code (5 digits – US) fields appears automatically and are compulsory; However, these fields are not valid for an Indian address and hence deleting the complete address from amazonpayments and entering it again in Mturk is the only option to edit rather enter a correct Indian address again. Mturk knows this but somehow they are not rectifying it as the number of Indian users are less and an alternative to edit the Indian address exists (explained by me)

HTH, let me know the result :)

Sridar February 14th, 2009 at 7:31 pm

thank you rajeshmago for your help. I rectified it.

joe bri February 18th, 2009 at 5:05 pm

how long did it take you to make that 5000 dollar check, I started working for mturk just last month and it have only made 170 dollars so far i took low paying hits to get my approval score up just to get a boat load of rejects from someone i know that was misusing the service. Anyways how long did it take my goal is to make 1000 a month is that to high? I spend at least 8 hours a day on the PC.

rajeshmago February 18th, 2009 at 9:24 pm

@ Joe Bri: Hi! I never made $ 5000 from Mturk. What you saw was my total earnings (over than $ 500 in MTurk a/c and Rs. 5752.21 – Indian currency cheque, not USD) in about 1 year period working for average of 1 hour per day approximately. I didn’t use to work much at Mturk when I joined. It was only after few months that I started working 1-2 hours per day doing various HITS. I could never find nice paying writing work in computers and related areas barring one technical writing assignment of $ 90.

I have stopped working at Mturk from last 3 months! Hence, I don’t know the type of HITS that are there nowadays.

But assuming that the types of HITS are still same and seeing that you are ready to put 8 hours per day at Mturk looking for an earning of $ 1000 p.m, your target will be to earn $ 1000/240 hours = 4.16 per hour.

This can be done if you start doing article writing, reviews writing and transcription etc. (Only high paying HITS) assignments at fast speed meeting the Requester approval criteria. If you don’t have the abilities to do these type of assignments, then see how you can get them. Also, clearing all the qualifications tests will also make you eligible for more HITS.

Or, you can do some research at Mturk for the high paying assignments for few days and then analyze to see what type of high paid work is consistently appearing and how you can do the same.

These are my views only and you can try them but please don’t catch my neck if these don’t work :smile: Mturk is meant for exploitation and their rules are bent to favor Requesters and harass the Worker.

Even if you are able to make $4.16 per hour, it’s still a very low pay rate by any standards. Better would be to do some offline work as it will pay more. I am sure I am making sense!

Why don’t you try the sites – http://homejobstop.com/, http://www.telecommute-jobs.com & http://www.craigslist.org. They might work better for you being in US.

Please do your own research as these are my views and I am not giving any 100% guarantee of genuinity of any of the sites.

All the best!

selva March 15th, 2009 at 2:14 pm

Hi rajesh,

recently i joined mturk. I need to know where I have to upload my PAN scanned copy?. Where is the option to receive check for indians. I searched everywhere, but in vain.

Secondly, did you did audio transcribing job?. If so how can we learn it. I don’t about it, but I found that only this job and article writing job pays well. Please help

rajeshmago March 16th, 2009 at 10:05 am

@ Selva:

1. For a new Mturk user (India’s) who has not given ID proof, the message “Did you know that you can now enroll to withdraw your Mechanical Turk earnings in Indian Rupees? Learn more »” automatically comes at the top after Sign In.

After you click on “Learn more”, the below given URL will open in a browser window. In this screen, you will get withdrawl information and the facility to upload your ID document at the bottom.

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/startkycregistration

2. Remaining logged in to Mturk, click on “Account Settings” and at the top right corner, below “Your Earnings”, you will find the option to withdraw your earnings in Indian rupees. Kindly follow the procedure.

3. I never did any audio transcription assignments at Mturk and yes as compared to other HITs at Mturk, transcription HITs pay well. You will have to research on this yourself. There are companies that give transcription training. Find the best one in your place and go for it! Understanding of accent and medical terminology and good typing skills are important for doing medical transcription assignments.

For more details on entering your address and receiving your withdrawls, refer to the comments of this post.

Hope this helps

abhimanyu March 30th, 2009 at 9:23 pm

I have recently got a mturk cheque..1> how much time does it take to get it cleared…..as I HAVE A HDFC BANK BANK ACCOUNT which does not have a branch in europe???

2>do we have to sign at the back of cheque??

rajeshmago April 1st, 2009 at 8:57 pm

@ Abhimanyu: 1). The cheques that I received from Mturk were payable at all Citibank branches in India and they were issued by Citibank Singapore (talking of four months back). So, your HDFC cheque must be payable at Mumbai (should be written at the front of the cheque – something like payable at all branches of HDFC). The credit time should be three days 2). Yes, at the back of the cheque, you have to sign at the Payee endorsement. Sorry for the delay in responding, I was out of town for one and a half day.

David E. Williams of the Health business blog April 22nd, 2009 at 6:57 pm

I recently started using mturk as a requester. I used to use Casting Words for my podcast transcriptions but their customer service is terrible. Since they use mturk I decided to go to the source and pay reasonable rates directly to the workers.

Of my first 6 podcasts, 5 were good to excellent and one was fair to poor. I still paid for the one that wasn’t very good, but I did decide to block that worker.

rajeshmago April 22nd, 2009 at 9:00 pm

@ David: Good to have your comment on my blog – the first one from a Mturk Requester. Hope that you get better work quality next time for your transcription HITS at Mturk. Thanks for sharing your experience.

Akshay May 10th, 2009 at 10:03 pm

hay..! Thanks for all the discussion u have made here. it really helped me to receive my 1st payment. i really felt good with it.!
i would like to make my second payment request in the month of Mturk Anniversary to receive the Mug! :lol: :smile: ! Please tell me when did u make the payment request receive that beautiful Amazon Mturk Mug.! I checked out from Google that mturk was started on 2nd November. please tell me when did u make the request. Your money check is dated on september 4th is it somewhere around this time u made the request.?? :smile:
Have a nice day!!!

rajeshmago May 11th, 2009 at 8:16 am

@Akshay: Congratulations on receiving your first Mturk earnings cheque. Also, thanks for finding my discussions at blog useful.

My last two withdrawls from Mturk were in October and November 2008. I think that Mturk might have sent the mug/gift to all their active workers with decent HIT approval rate or to workers who have been consistently giving them good revenue in form of Requesters commissions. I see no harm in verifying the gift sending criteria from Mturk.

Ask them – Some of my friends got Mturk anniversary gift from Mturk last year and I want to know How I can too get free gift from Mturk on its anniversary in November this year?

BTW – I am not going to get anything from Mturk this year as I have stopped working there :)

The “Contact Us” link of Mturk is:

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/contactus

Wishing you success!

Rajesh

AKSHAY May 12th, 2009 at 12:40 am

Their Customer support is Excellent , they replied me in just 2 hours. Sad news is i dont think they will send me. since my earnings r low at this time, i think they expect very high earnings.
what was your total earnings on Mturk?
What is Qualification requirements.. What was your Qualification on Mturk??

This is the reply that i got…

Greetings from Mechanical Turk.

I’m glad to hear that you’re enjoying working on Mechanical Turk. Last year, we sent gifts to top-performing workers to celebrate our anniversary. I’m sorry that we don’t yet know if this will be repeated in 2009, nor can we discuss the qualification requirements… :neutral: :roll:

rajeshmago May 12th, 2009 at 7:34 am

@ Akshay: My total earnings at Mturk were more than $ 500 (not much), HIT approval rate was greater than 98% and I had attempted more than 10,000 HITS. You can try earning more money at Mturk maintaining decent HIT approval rate. The logic is if you give more money to Mturk in form of commissions (normally 10% share of Requester project cost), you increase your chances of getting gift from them.

Don’t worry; you can buy the same blue mug (sent by Mturk for free on their anniversary) for $5-10 in the market. Why not go today and buy that mug right now from your Mturk earnings?

My advice would be to always give your best on your projects and be happy with the results that you get from them, if you start worrying about the results (free gift etc.), you might not be able to give your best shot!

Cheers!

AKSHAY May 13th, 2009 at 12:54 am

ya..! I never thought on it! i too can but the same mug for 5$ in market. My HIT approval rate is around 96%, which i think is good so far, Dont have much idea how long will i work here> Hay if i keep money in my Mturk acc and do not login for a long time will all my money be lost?. I f u hav any idea regarding this please mail back..

Any ways could you also let me know what r the best ways to earn money on Internet.! Looking Forward for your reply!

rajeshmago May 13th, 2009 at 3:04 pm

@ Akshay – I have $ 13 in my Mturk account from last 5 months and it’s still there. The reason is that I simply stopped working at Mturk due to low rates and didn’t withdraw too as I wasn’t sure if I will continue again or not. Plus, one has to give $4 as withdrawl charges to Mturk when requesting the money through cheque. The money is safe unless Mturk suddenly closes one day without any notice – The probability of that happening right now is low as they are making decent profits (as per my visualization of their business model).

Coming to the honest ways of earning on Internet; There are many, some of them are Affiliate marketing, blogging, freelancing, running online store (sales site) and teaching etc. You can make money from anything that meets people needs in large volumes! But depending solely on online income that is to be generated from start is dangerous and not advisable, as it requires lot of hard work, focus and time to make things settle. Normally people who are new to online money making do some part time real world job too and after their business start giving good returns continuously for few months, they switch full time devoting complete time to their online ventures.

According to me, for online money generators, it’s always better to have some offline business or job that gives them stable income every month. Sometimes things changes too quickly on the Net and if you are 100% dependent on single online money stream then you are definitely going to suffer.

Hope that helps!

Nitish June 26th, 2009 at 5:49 pm

Hello Rajesh,

This page is a nice discussion about mturk from workers, and you have made a straightforward review which is very hard to see these days where blogger’s are paid to review. Good job there Rajesh.

I wanted to tell some good news happening at mturk. There is a group founded by some mturk workers to share and discuss what they are facing. The forum is:

http://www.turkernation.com/

Apart from this, there is a firefox plugin which adds a feature on mturk website to rate hits and write review on the requesters. This has come as a life saver to the workers. The plugin can be found here: http://turkopticon.differenceengines.com/

These days lots of hits are coming, usually around 80K to over a lakh hits, but nonetheless 0.01 is just nothing to work on.

Regards,
Nitish

rajeshmago June 27th, 2009 at 8:57 am

@Nitish: Thanks for finding the discussion useful. The two sites that you have shared are good. Turkopticon was shared by me in the comments of the post – http://www.pctipstricks.com/my-expert-tips-on-earning-more-from-mturk-as-a-worker/.

I knew of the site – turkernation.com, but few days back it was consistently giving errors (not found), so I didn’t share it.

Thanks too for adding more weight to this post.

I request readers to share Mturk alternatives, genuine and honest sites through which they are earning money, over here.

I always try my best to share my useful experiences over here so that they help people in some or other form – saving time and/or earning money. Good if it can make money for me and OK even if doesn’t.

rajeshmago July 6th, 2009 at 11:46 pm

@ Sivaramakrishnan: Sorry for late reply. Yes, I gave them a digital copy of my PAN card as an ID proof to MTURK and they accepted it. Here is the relevant portion of terms from Mturk site:

https://requester.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=worker

How do I receive payment in Indian Rupees?

If you are a worker in India, you can elect to receive a check for your earnings in Indian Rupees. You will need to provide your birth date, passport number, Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) number or Permanent Account Number (PAN). A scanned copy of your passport, EPIC or PAN card is also required. All the information you need to sign up to receive payments denominated in Rupees is provided on the Account Settings page.

Hope it helps.

Waqar September 2nd, 2009 at 10:15 am

HI Rajesh,
Very nice discussion about mturk and if i get it before a month i will not start working with mturk as I am waqar from pakistan and after getting work for 6 dollar i came to knew that they pay in cash only for US and american, so I have to stop the work. Discussion is very usefull about human intelligence task (HITS), My question is that have you knew any other site which work like Mturk and can pay in pakistan or through alertpay or money booking like scriptlance.com or any other site.
Thanks

rajeshmago September 2nd, 2009 at 9:22 pm

@ Waqar: There are lot of freelancing sites where can try getting work. Do a google search and check the reviews before doing any project. My advice would be to not to pay any membership fees. You can check craigslist.org or write directly to the companies/individuals for giving you work. This can be done through Work from home forums. I got some writing assignments by these techniques. I am presently spending most of my time in offline teaching. Another idea that I am going to try is online tutoring. I hope that it helps. All the best!

Brian Egge September 19th, 2009 at 10:09 am

Hi Rajesh,

As a mturk requester, I’ve been trying to figure out how to pay workers more and get higher quality.

Right now, I have a HIT which pays $0.02. I have three people do the same HIT, hoping that two of them will come up with the same answer.

If I could get higher quality, I wouldn’t have to have three people answer each HIT. I’ve also done HITs which have paid $1. When you pay more, it seems you attract more people, but get more people who are attempting to cheat the system.

Most people turk for fun, and not for profit. I’ve also worked as a worker, and you are right – it doesn’t pay compared to what an hourly job could pay.

rajeshmago September 23rd, 2009 at 12:44 am

Hi Brian,

Thanks for taking your time off to write your experiences as Mturk worker and requester now. I understand that being a past worker at Mturk, I can be biased. Yes, I know that there are workers who try to cheat the system but I don’t agree with this cheating. If the rates are too low, they shouldn’t take that assignment. Doing cheating for fun doesn’t make sense to me! I still have the professional attitude for all my projects and would continue to do so in future too. Hope that you find honest and hard working workers and pay them well for the same.

venkat October 18th, 2009 at 9:13 am

sir
i am normal person with hearing problem. i had done my masters degree in M.B.A. DUE TO deaf i cannot attend interviews also. for that i choose to earn through online can you help me.
i can do any kind of work. i came to know about mturk recently and i want to know how to get qualifications for
Ask a Question – Earn a bonus up to $4 per Question each day! this hit because it seems good and easy. please help me.

rajeshmago October 18th, 2009 at 7:29 pm

@Venkat: Login to your Mturk account and then search for “ask a question” by pasting it from here in the white search bar, i.e. Search for Hits containing…. at the top and clicking on GO. Now there will be some results, I can presently see 5 results. Click on “Show all details” and the top two results are the ones that you are looking for, i.e. – Ask a Question – Earn a bonus up to $4 per Question each day! (Reward: $0.06) and second one with reward of reward of $0.10. You can now click on “Request Qualification (Why?”) for these two HITS and proceed accordingly.

BTW – To qualify for these two HITS, you don’t have to clear any tests. I quickly read the instructions for completing these these HITS which has reward of $ 0.06 and $ 0.10 and I must say that they are not in line with the low money, these HITS are difficult and require hard work. According to my views, one shouldn’t do these HITS hoping that the Requester will pay $4 for each of the answer as world is not so sweet! The reward of $4 is not guaranteed and is at the discretion of the Requester. The concept of $4 bonus is make people attract for doing these two HITS of $0.10 and $0.06 which will easily take minutes of yours. If you still want to do these low paying HITS, please follow the above instructions. Best of luck!

venkat October 19th, 2009 at 2:10 am

when requesting qualifications it is getting not qualified. you please verify it.and please tell me some tips to earn extra money on online.

rajeshmago October 19th, 2009 at 8:29 am

@Venkat: For “Ask a question” HITS, authorization from Askville is needed and their is no qualification test. For testing purpose, I have requested permission for both $0.10 and $0.06 HITS. Let me see if Askville approves me. Anyway, I am never going to do these low paying HITS.

For earning money online, I am still not satisfied with any product and once I am happy with a product after testing it and with its results, I will let all of you know.

venkat October 21st, 2009 at 2:16 am

hi
is there any time limit to withdraw our money from mturk. the thing is i had earned 42.34 dollars from two months now in my account settings it is showing only 24 dollars. Can you say me what happened to my earnings.

rajeshmago October 21st, 2009 at 8:42 pm

@ Venkat: No, the money ideally should remain same, i.e 42.34 dollars only.

In my case, even after one year, I still have the same money that I left one year back, i.e. $ 13.87. So, if the money in your Mturk account has become less, contact Mturk customer support and ask them.

BTW – I checked my account balance after logging in at – https://www.mturk.com/mturk/youraccount

You can also see transaction history (by time period) via – “View your account balance and transaction history” at the page that appears from the above link.

Money credited to my Mturk account when I used to work for their Requesters was never debited once credited.

venkat October 22nd, 2009 at 2:01 am

sir,
I want to know is there any other websites are offering hits like this.
And i need your opinion i have friends who had some mental problems and we all together join and work on this by recruiting persons. Is it good

rajeshmago October 22nd, 2009 at 9:47 am

@Venkat: No, I don’t know of any other sites similar to Mturk. I tried freelancing and other work from home sites/forums – odesk.com, elance.com, getafreelancer.com, work-at-home-forum.com and whydowork.com etc. but somehow they didn’t work for me. The bids at freelancing sites were very low and getting projects was too much time consuming. The problem at jobs available via work from home forums was that they were mostly looking for workers from USA only.

I have already written that I am not doing assignments of Mturk from last one year. What I am doing is offline teaching of maths, science and computers. So, mturking is low paying and there is no guarantee of getting payments from Requesters for even genuine work. My advice would be not to do Mturking! Recruiting other persons is not viable as the profit margin would be too low and these persons after knowing the site – mturk.com would do the work directly instead of doing through you.

I am presently working on project of designing my own blogs and websites for generating revenue and implementing the training tips given by paid membership site. In 1-2 months, the results will be out and if it works for me, it will work for you and your friends too.

SRINI October 23rd, 2009 at 7:00 pm

:|
Sir,
I have working in mturk from last one month… but unfortunately my M turk Account was suspended coz in my account many Hits are rejected so… In my account balance is $100 but i don’t know how to withdraw that amount…

I already contact to Mturk Customer care they said they will get in touch with in few business working days… but till now i didn’t get any updates..

Kindly plz advice me how i will withdraw the my account balance..

rajeshmago October 25th, 2009 at 1:08 am

@ Srini: Keep sending email to Mturk via this contact form till they give a satisfactory reply:
https://www.mturk.com/mturk/contactus

Also, register for free at http://turkers.proboards.com/ and then contact spamgirl (forum administrator id). She should help you in getting your money from Mturk as written in the given below post whose URL is:

http://turkers.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=kgeneral&action=display&thread=4896&page=3

I also found this about Mturk:
http://www.ripoffreport.com/Search/Company/Mturk-com-Amazon.aspx

If you don’t get a response about your Mturk suspended account money withdrawl from either Mturk or through turkers proboard then lodge a complaint at these sites:

http://www.ripoffreport.com/Login.aspx?returnUrl=/FileReport.aspx
https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/
http://www.complaintsboard.com/new_complaint/

Hope that you definitely get your hard earned money from Mturk.

Musenge November 2nd, 2009 at 9:56 am

Your comments and experience in Mturk are very important and useful for new users!!!I’m from Colombia, and i worked in Mturk for some months. Unfortunatly, i can’t request my payment because i don’t have an american bank account. Mr. Rajesh, do you have experimented with PTC’s and sites about voting blackmarket? Thanks.

rajeshmago November 2nd, 2009 at 9:42 pm

@ Musenge: Thanks for praising this post of mine. I tried about 30-40 international PTC (paid to click) sites some 4-5 years back and none of them ever paid me. I then never tried PTC again as the money is too low, generally 1 cent per click and then there are limited clicks per day. I am not aware of “voting blackmarket”. Are you referring to getting money for voting at social networking sites? If yes, then I won’t try them as again there is no guarantee of money and the pay is also low. Keep trying, wishing you success!

Ramesh November 3rd, 2009 at 10:36 pm

Hi Rajesh & All:

I joined mturk just a week back when I found it accidentally while searching for some other info. Then I found your blog too.

Thought of sharing my experience so far. I am working for around 6 months on freelance sites like RentACoder, oDesk, LivePerson etc.

Initially I was very impressed by this whole concept of mturk as it is quite different from the other freelance sites, no bidding, no advertising yourself, just search work and finish. But like you I was also disappointed by the rates they are offering. I then started doing these tasks just for fun during spare time and not for money as I came to know it cannot be a source of money. But after doing some analysis I came to a conclusion that if you can plan carefully, take some time and study the kinds of jobs available and the rates offered, you can devise a strategy and can earn decent money.

Basically you have to analyze the time required for the task and the rate offered and just do those jobs which offer value for your time and efforts, may those jobs be paying just 0.10 or 0.20. For example there are many tasks which require just a minute and the rates are 0.10 or 0.20. Do those tasks. Also look for repetitive tasks which are available in 100s or 1000s and can be quickly completed.

Today I came across one SEO task on which I worked for 2 hours and earned $15, not bad I think. I could have worked whole day on that task and earned lot more but as I said I do it just for fun and also I cannot work on such mechanical task for a whole day. Even though this task paid not so great I learn few interesting things about SEO so I am overall happy. Even though this task paid low I done it carefully and one interesting thing happened. The requester is impressed with my work and he contacted me directly on my email id is planning to give me a project in my area of expertise which I will execute outside of mturk independently. This is not yet confirmed as of now but I am positive about it.

So I think instead of looking into negative aspects of mturk or any other thing for that matter, if you do your work seriously with dedication you will learn new things and opportunities will follow you.

Regards,
Ramesh

rajeshmago November 3rd, 2009 at 11:37 pm

@ Ramesh: Thanks for sharing your positive experience of Mturk and your strategy for earning more by doing the HITS that pays more. It’s good to know that you are a satisfied worker (in Mturk language) at Mturk. The post shared my negative experiences of Mturk and I was not at fault when my genuine work was rejected a lot of times and not paid despite it being correct. My questions of finding the mistakes in my rejected work were not answered/poorly answered and these Requesters openly laughed at me as they could easily get the work done for free from me and similar other workers like mine. My HIT rate that was always more than 99% even after thousand of HITS started coming down and then I decided not to work at such low rates with no guarantee of payment for even genuine work. Reporting to Mturk was of no avail as Worker cannot do anything against a Requester but a Requester can do anything. I am not saying that every worker will have bad experience like me but yes I thought it better to share my negative experiences to let other workers know that it’s very easy for Requesters to cheat at Mturk. Mturk never did any improvement to any of my complaints even after one year of this post of mine. It’s good to know that you are happy at Mturk but I would still stay far away from it as it’s not my cup of tea any more after such bitter experiences. I would say that I was not as lucky as you as I also did correct work but got series of bad Requesters who took me for an easy ride (didn’t pay me and got the work done for free)! Wishing you more success and hoping that you always get good honest Requesters!

Ramesh November 4th, 2009 at 9:27 am

Rajesh, I know it hurts when someone cheats on you and this can happen anywhere not just on mturk. I have very positive experience from one of the requesters you have mentioned in some earlier post of of yours. Also for one of the clients (the one who is giving me more work outside of mturk) I sent him my work directly to his personal email id as I was not able to send that on mturk because I closed the HIT I was working on for him. He could have easily cheated on me but instead he paid for all the work plus little extra and appreciated my work. May be I am lucky :)

As said earlier I am just working on mturk for fun and with the current situation I don’t see it can be a full-time source of income for anybody working there. Besides there is no value addition in terms of gaining some knowledge is going to happen to you by working on such tasks. It can be considered as just a cool way to get few extra bucks while having some fun. Earlier I used to catch on with some computer games to relax for some time when I felt stressed out with work. Now I play mturk :) I see lots of crazy requests on mturk from the requesters and I really don’t know what they are going to do with that stuff. May be some of the requesters are also looking at mturk as a way to spend some time having fun :)

I just wanted to convey a message that if you look at the positive side of any situation you can definitely be benefited and it will boost your morale too.

I am also trying to figure out some effective ways to earn money online as you guys are doing so felt connected to you guys and joined this thread so that I can get some pointers on it and share my experience too.

rajeshmago November 4th, 2009 at 1:14 pm

Ramesh: I must say that you are really a positive person and have spread positiveness over here with your comments. I have still not surrendered in MMO (Make Money Online) segment after learning so much in the last 6 years by working part time. I have spent thousand of dollars of my hard earned money in trying so many things in MMO domain. I at least now know what doesn’t work ;) I am now trying things from honest and expert marketers who knows their stuff (they look so). I am looking forward to implementing the training tips from a paid training program in coming two months for earning few hundred dollars though Affiliate marketing and Adsense. Presently I am going through the training videos and material and would start implementing them soon. Would share with you people if it works! Its high time and I am sure that this money making thing is definitely going to work now for me with stable online income every month!!!

Ramesh November 5th, 2009 at 11:35 am

All the best to you Rajesh and we would definitely like to know about your progress on your new adventure.

Matt in Chicago November 13th, 2009 at 11:51 am

Check out Microworkers it’s a great alternative to Mturk –

http://microworkers.com/?Id=e8d4a29f

:mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

rajeshmago November 15th, 2009 at 7:20 pm

@Matt: Sorry for delay in approving your comment (one week), the reason was that it went into a pile of spam and I noticed it before deleting it today. Could you share your experience of http://www.microworkers.com? I hope that it was positive one. And, thanks for bringing it over here! Hope that it works for people who are already happy (an additional source of income) as well as disgusted working at Mturk. I am also going to test it from my side and would write a post separately if it deserves it.

Ramesh November 16th, 2009 at 1:24 am

Checked microworkers.com. It is same as mturk. Pay rates are same, nothing great except that it allows you to withdraw your earnings through PayPal. Jobs are very few as it seems this is a new site.

rajeshmago November 16th, 2009 at 6:47 am

@ Ramesh: Thanks for checking microworkers.com and writing your feedback here. I hope that with time, this site will grow in terms of volume of tasks as they are promising to pay by paypal. Coming to the pay rates, yes they are same as Mturk and to keep competition they will always be low, so nothing great at microworkers.com.

Ramesh December 8th, 2009 at 4:16 am

Does anybody doing currency trading? I am thinking of trying my hands on it and need information and few tips possibly.

I have no experience on this but got an trial account with virtual $50,000 for practice from fxcm.com. Will start practice in a couple of days, if anybody can give fist hand information it would be great.

Thanks,
Ramesh

rajeshmago December 8th, 2009 at 11:08 pm

@Ramesh: Sorry, I have no experience in currency trading. You should try free currency trading blogs and forums etc. to begin with. Once you have experience and training, start low and see how it goes. If I can help you in some way, let me know. I wish you success! Don’t forget to come and share your success story with us. All the best!

Anand December 9th, 2009 at 5:53 pm

Hi Rajesh,

I am astonished to see, and appreciate your devotion in answering the folks regarding Mturk queries. You don’t miss any day and work better than even the official customer support of Amazon. I have now bookmarked your blog and it has become my routine to come here regularly :smile:

I am (or should I say WAS?) in Mturk as a worker. But I had to halt my activities due to an another sort of exploit they are doing to the workers. To withdraw my earnings, I had sent them a scanned copy of my Elector’s Photo Identity Card at 17 November. As, it is said on their website that they will verify it within one week, in hope that It was mistakenly left from the quie, – I contacted them after one week and got surprised, when they said that it will take 10 more days.

So, I waited more 10 days, but when I got no response even after the 4th December, I cantacted them again, and with more surprise, they told me to wait for more 10 days because they have kinda more workload.

So I would like to say here, that it may be an another trick implied by Amazon to not let the workers withdraw their money in cash, thus forced to buy goodies from Amazon. I used to wonder at first, that why they only have only one way to withdraw the money – No Paypal, no moneybookers, no e-gold, no bank deposit – just nothing but direct cheques (sent on bicycles and bullock carts as usual) for also which, they need to have some of your documents (so that, they can tell you delay in it’s verifying procedure). Now I understand why is it so. All they want you to purchase some useless stuff on Amazon and waste your money there.

If it’s the workload, can’t they simply increase their staff? As being such a Giant International company, don’t they have this much much to pay a few more employees, who will exclusively do this verifying task?

So for other users, It’s my recommendation to not get trapped in their new exploit policy. Or if it is a must, register, submit your Identity proof, and when it got verfied (after a few years) then start working – so that you won’t loose anything if it takes forever to verify.

rajeshmago December 16th, 2009 at 12:02 am

@ Anand: Sorry for the delay in approving and replying to your comment. The reason for the delay was the major maintenance work going in my house for a week. Coming to your comments, thanks for appreciating my efforts for helping users. It feels good to know that people are still benefiting from this post (though it is quite old and not in favor of Mturk). I fully agree with you on all the points made by you. The fact is Amazon Mturk doesn’t care much about Workers like us as there are plenty and Mturk doesn’t have much competition (almost all of the other sites involve bidding and posting of Worker profile and their selection for the project etc.). Mturk gives a damn to the Worker but care a lot about the Requester even if they cheat the workers. No big company has become big by honest means (they exploit and have awkward policies that benefits them most). Mturk is not the end of the world, if one explores he/she will definitely find better work opportunities (offline or online). All the best!

Ramesh December 16th, 2009 at 1:21 am

@Anand & Rajesh

Agreed mturk is not a better online work option but my experience so far is very good. I submitted around 150+ jobs and only two rejected that too for proper reasons. I got paid for all others. Got my paycheck within 10 days. Got it cleared in a couple of days. Got some clients who became my friends and hope to get business from them in future outside mturk.

I liked the overall idea of mturk, no bidding, no profile required etc. Only drawback is pay rate but for that Amazon is not responsible. How can they control how much client want to pay when there are people who are ready to work on low rates? If pay rates gets better then I think this would be great place to earn some extra bucks especially housewives and others who stay at home and not working.

rajeshmago December 16th, 2009 at 9:52 am

@ Ramesh: Thanks again for sharing your experiences. Mturk comparatively is good if you are a Requester :) . The reasons are that you can get quality work done at very low rates within your chosen time. So, why not look at brighter side of the picture, ire business opportunities that makes us Requesters instead of Workers. Then, as we have already worked as Workers, we can offer good pay rates and do honest approval of the work too. It’s all matter of perspective. However, some of the changes that Mturk can do to improve their business are:

- Monitor HITS pay rates and not allow any task of less than 5 cents to be uploaded.
- Some feedback system from the Worker for the Requester too (this will ensure that Requesters cannot cheat openly).
- Bring more variety of tasks (I could rarely find technical writing and technical support etc).
- Improve the payment procedure by making quick payments by payment processors.

One point that I would like to make to Ramesh is that even if you get direct clients through Mturk, they will pay you the low rates that they were paying in Mturk market, so, it will not be lucrative.

It would be a dream turned true if all the Workers could form an association and do some controlling over the Mturk system by agreeing not to work at less than certain pay rates.

It would be a dream turned true if all the Workers could form an association and do some controlling over the Mturk system by agreeing not to work at less than certain pay rates.

Ramesh December 16th, 2009 at 4:24 pm

@Rajesh

Your suggestions are good and I hope they will be implemented by mturk in near future.

I was thinking of compiling the online resources the we can use to generate money.

As far as myself, I work on some of the freelance sites on database projects.

I have my profiles on the following sites:

1. oDesk – One of the best to my opinion for all kinds of projects.

2. RentACoder – I have good experience working there.

3. Elance – Didn’t like it much. It charges service providers to bid on the projects. They do provide free bidding but very limited and often not sufficient to bid on large projects.

4. LivePerson – Very high commission rates, 30% for the providers. Limited number of large projects. Good thing is you don’t have to search for the work, it comes to you, only you have to be online on their chat system. They do have job posting board but most of the clients prefer to contact whoever online on chat and do the dealing directly.

5. MyZoox – New one but I really see a good potential. They offered me free featured profile for one year as I was one of the early subscribers.

I request you and anybody watching this thread to share their experience with any other sites and also any other ways to generate money.

I often find that working solo on these sites limits your abilities to bid on large projects as you have limited skills so I am thinking of building a virtual team with varied skills. Please let me know if anybody is interested.

rajeshmago December 17th, 2009 at 1:07 pm

@ Ramesh – I very much appreciate the fact that you are sharing your online earning experiences openly with the community. Not everyone does that with so much enthusiasm and honesty. I am sure people would find the list of sites with your comments useful. At my end, none of the freelancing sites worked well for me. The main reason being the low rates that I used to get for the quality work done by me. And, I don’t work on a freelancing projects according to the pay rates, I work as if it’s my project, a shortcoming that I never could work out well till now. After sometime, I get bored of getting the low rates that didn’t match my hard work and hence I have almost stopped trying freelancing sites, Also one has to be always on toes, giving tests, improving profile, bidding, writing covering letters to convince the Poster that I am the right person for the job. Doing all this is too much of work and sometimes all these efforts doesn’t yield anything (no projects). I also hate taking orders from someone, people used to change their defined project work without changing the rates (cheating and complaining this doesn’t help as the freelancing sites are bothered about their commissions). Freelancing projects offer very less money and are meant for finding the cheapest work force. When one work on a freelancing project, the payment is one time only and not recurring. Once you complete the project, you get your payment and it’s Tata, Bye-bye from the Proejct poster end. Thus, freelancing sites didn’t work for me.

My long run idea of working for myself is to produce sites that keep on generating money forever and not once. I am presently working on offline teaching assignments and soon would launch some Wordpress blogs (niche ones in Computers) based on the training received from Experts (money generation based on ad revenue or selling products). I am also exploring the Online teaching industry and Affiliate Marketing. I would soon launch a separate blog to share my online money making experiences. BTW – Working as a Worker would never make someone rich, one can become rich by launching his/her own products/service or selling someone else products (Affiliate marketing) – to start with. The key to making decent money online is entrepreneurship and doing own business. Decent earning Consultants make tons of money but they have their own sites and they know how to sell themselves by sales letter, testimonials, joint venturing and SEO etc. So, in long run, your own sites and the art of selling yourself is going to make you a good online/offline money generator. Also, offline market is better compared to online market as the chances of scams are less and there is less competition; You can always go and catch the person if he/she doesn’t pay you!

Ramesh December 17th, 2009 at 6:33 pm

Rajesh:

Your ideas are good and I am sure they will work.

I have very different experience on freelance sites. There is variety of work available here and you can have long term relationships with customers. It is not always one time job, I have repeat customers who post jobs only for me. It’s exclusively for me and nobody can bid on those.

I never got cheated till now. The sites like RentACoder offers excellent mediation services wherein cheating is not possible from both sides. They have escrow system which ensures guarantee of payment. If dispute arise they have mediators who thoroughly check your work and give honest decision.

In fact for my first project on RentACoder I got paid even if my work didn’t help buyer. I was working for an Australian buyer and after a week we come to a conclusion that this project is not required as there was easy way to do the same job. I misinterpreted the specs. I offered my buyer to cancel the project with canceling charges borne by me but he appreciated my efforts and closed the project by paying me the full amount and surprisingly a bonus too.

For one of other projects I could not complete it due to lack of technical knowledge in that area but my buyer bear the cancellation charges and canceled the project.

On mturk there was SEO task. My buyer liked my work and wanted me to work on more such tasks outsides of mturk. I worked and sent my work to his personal email id and he paid me the amount as a bonus on mturk.

I work directly for some of the clients whom I found on these sites and they pay me honestly in paypal. They pay bonus as well when they like my work and efforts.

I even borrowed money from one of the American buyers :)

With my experience I can say there is lot of good work on these sites but you need to have a team with varied skills as you cannot cope up with large projects on an individual basis. I am in a process of building a team.

Thanks much for sharing your ideas and I would like to have updates from you how they are going. I believe sharing ideas can help us to succeed together.

Regards,
Ramesh

Nitish December 17th, 2009 at 6:57 pm

Nice discussion since I last posted about 6 months ago.

@Ramesh I liked the idea. Yes especially for bigger projects, it is not possible to handle alone. What kinds of projects or do you work on? Web development, writing or blogging, graphics?

@Rajesh I have been freelancing for a few months now, and I have a completely different opinion and experience. Yes I agree, most of the people would get their work done, pay and vanish without a contact. I must say, I have been avoiding people like this, it can be clearly seen in their post description. They have almost no clue, they just want get a website up, get some banners made for some occasions, etc.

So thats about them, the other half(just assumption)which I actively seek and have been successful in doing so are existing programmers, designers, they have already overloaded and they pay quick, because they are already in the business and earn from it. For example, a few days ago, there was someone who posted an urgent requirement for someone for wordpress plugins and site edit, posted on getafreelancer. I was just online posted minutes within his post, he selected and did it. Thats it, 25$ for an hour or so. I always wish my days are like this always.

The thing doesn’t end here, after completing that, he asked if I would like to do another work, rather indirectly asking to continue working for him. So liek this there are many poeple who are overloaded and always search for skilled developers. Pay? Its dollars, 45 rupees. They pay according to their country. I think I opened the secret of my success.

rajeshmago December 17th, 2009 at 9:44 pm

@ Nitish: Thanks for getting involved in the discussion again. Nice idea of working on those projects where you can see a long term relation with the Buyer. Freelancing requires hard work, patience, networking, selling and upgradation of skills (as per the market needs for technical projects), mental toughness (no emotionalism on some rejections and meeting the scheduled targets) and relationship management. It’s tough in the start but once your profile is good, you start getting projects automatically. I am happy to know that freelancing has worked for you. I would still work independently on my projects though but would definitely analyze and rework on shortcomings at my end if I start doing freelancing projects again (through bidding sites). What I see is that I need to be more patient, try lot of freelancing sites, network and be more tough (even if some genuine work of mine is rejected hoping that all the customers are not the same). My suggestion would be to develop a site of your own where you can sell your skills, it would take time to get business through your own site but if you devote time on it everyday, it will definitely reward you in the long run :) Once you have your site, you can always contact the prospective customers directly. I have got some technical writing work by referring to my pctipstricks.com posts to completely new customers; It surely works.

selva December 19th, 2009 at 11:30 pm

As Rajesh said, Mturk Requester is the king. If Requester says 1+1=3, Amazon says it is perfectly correct and the Worker answer was wrong. I don’t think Indians will have long relationship with Mturk as they will be banned sooner or later.

For freelancing sites, we should have patience equal to waiting for water to become ice in room temperature in getting project.

As Rajesh said, best way to earn huge money is Affiliate Marketing. Rajesh, are you mentioning about sites like clickbank?. To get success in this, we should know about SEO, excellent writing and selling skills etc.

Ramesh December 19th, 2009 at 11:39 pm

@Nitish
I work on Oracle PL/SQL development, Unix Shell Scripting, Basic DBA work and Jasper iReport.

I need someone good in web development so that we can work together on projects where back end is Oracle and front end is web based.

I am trying to train myself on MySQL as there are many projects on MySQL/PHP. I can see a lot of demand for OpenSource technologies on freelance sites.

Please let know if we can work together.

Sorry Rajesh, I think I am using your thread for personal benefit and I hope you will not mind as your intention to start this discussion was to share ideas and help each other.

rajeshmago December 20th, 2009 at 9:15 am

@ Ramesh: No issues, you have also done sharing of your money earning experiences which is surely helping readers and visitors of this blog. Hope that you are able to form the web development team at the earliest. You can also try posting your ad at free classified sites – craigslist.org etc. If I can be of some more help, let me know.

Ramesh December 20th, 2009 at 10:01 am

Thanks Rajesh. By the way I wanted to know if you have any idea about how much in demand are the skills on SEO, Internet marketing, Link building etc.

Do you have any idea where can get trained on these skills? I found this site http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/training/ which may be of help in this regard. Please let me know your comments/views.

@Selva
Getting freelance projects is not a big deal. Having right skills is a challenge. I am thinking over the idea of getting projects done through these freelance sites wherein I will work on getting requirements, writing high level specifications, posting project, selecting service providers and getting work done. In this process I will not work on coding part of the project but only on requirement analysis, writing specs and User Acceptance Testing. A mediator between requester and service provider. Let me check if this works.

rajeshmago December 20th, 2009 at 10:42 am

@ Selva: Thanks for your comments. More than 50% Workers at Mturk are from US, source: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jwross/pubs/SocialCode-2009-01.pdf. The given pdf file is a good reading for any Mturk Worker as it has come from research survey of Mturk workers. So, the non justified rejection from Requester applies to Worker from every country and not only from India. Also, what I am referring from my side is the online/offline ways of earning money with minimum dependence on looking for work through freelancing sites etc. You create income for yourself without looking for work. This can be done by selling your products, others products or working as a Publisher through Google Adsense etc. The key here is to find ways to work for yourself and make money without looking at other people to give you work. Clickbank is Ok, though paydot.com is new and better. If you know how to sell online you can sell anyone’s products and not only from affiliate products network (interface between merchants and affiliates). I won’t say that I am expert in earning money online but I am trying, improving myself constantly and striving to make my dream of earning money without looking at other people for giving me work. In coming months, I am going to outsource most of my work that can be done by someone else instead of me. Selling require multiple skills and the skills listed by me are part of that. And, if one is new to all this stuff – Affiliate Marketing, designing sites and blogs and their marketing, please do it side by side and don’t leave your present money making job; all this takes time to learn, apply and then earn money.

selva December 20th, 2009 at 11:14 am

Rajesh: Thanks for your reply. The pdf link is useful. You can also look at this: http://publish.smartsheet.com/ddedf95d7fe14f4e8f02e946255ec334

Why I said Indians can’t earn for long time from Mturk is this: There are 100’s of Requester and if any 3 block you, your account will be closed. This applies for all people. The only way for Indians to continue is to create a different account on relative, friends proof and then they should depend on the relative for check clearance etc. For US people, I found that once their account is banned, they continue to create a new account on their name but with different bank account (it’s easy).

I also know about paydot.com. For this, once we do huge effort initially, we get large rewards later.

rajeshmago December 20th, 2009 at 12:00 pm

@ Ramesh: Yes, thirtydaychallenge training from Ed Dale is good for newbies interested in earning money online from their own sites. I have gone through it and though it is basic, it’s must for anyone new to online selling. Another good free resource for getting online selling training is Jeremy Palmer – Black ink project (Do a google search with the operator site:media.theblackinkproject.com in search box and you will find all the download files). These two resources are good for designing basic sites for selling products online but these are not professional training resources as they offer limited training and not from the Consultant point of view. I am presently taking training on making money mainly from Publishers program (Adsense) and once it works for me, I would share with all of you. Once you are expert in SEO, link building, generating traffic and Internet marketing (superset of the other listed things), you need not look for assignments from someone else, you can market your own sites and make decent income online. I have read good reviews for Aaron Wall’s SEO training but cannot afford it presently ($ 300 p.m) but it’s surely on my agenda. The non affiliate link to Aaron Wall SEO training is: http://www.seobook.com/join/. Please note that I have not been a member of Aaron’s membership site but am recommending based on reviews, my knowledge and understanding.

Ramesh December 20th, 2009 at 12:42 pm

Rajesh:

Thanks much buddy for sharing the great info. I will certainly be looking into these sites and reserve some time on daily basis to get acquainted with all these concepts. I too hate depending on others for the work. Please keep sharing your experiences and I will do the same.

rajeshmago December 20th, 2009 at 12:43 pm

@ Selva: To not get one’s Mturk Worker a/c banned, what I can advise is: Work on high paying HITs, understand them and attempt them only if you know how to do them correctly. If a HIT is unclear and is not making sense, do not attempt it at all. Do not give a chance to Requester to reject your work/ban you. Ideally, if possible, when one is working on a new HIT, submit one and check if it gets approved. If Yes, then do the similar ones or if not, then contact the Requester and ask the reason. Do the new ones only if you know what was wrong with the previous rejected HIT. This tip has worked for me and I hope that it works for my friends too. Also, banning should be done only when a Worker is grossly negligent and not on very small mistakes. I am not sure about the Mturk Worker account ban policy. If a Worker is surely submitting 100% correct work, why not logically fight back and ask the reasons? At my side, if my Mturk account is banned (instead I requested them to ban some of the Requesters accounts who rejected my HITS without any logic but they didn’t, I was ready to prove that these Requesters cheated me), I would never use someone else account to do the HITS as the Mturk pay rates do not deserve so much of efforts. Keep on exploring and I am sure that you will find other better paying opportunities than Mturk.

Arun January 5th, 2010 at 1:06 am

Great Review on Mturk! I agree with you 100%. Indians continue to be exploited by the developed world. We are being treated like slaves. Its high time the Government sets some stringent labour laws on minimum wages. Please send good posts like this directly to my email address. Great work Rajesh. Keep it up.

rajeshmago January 5th, 2010 at 11:44 pm

@ Arun: Thanks for finding this review useful. According to me, on freelancing sites, no one can exploit any worker if the worker is not willing to be exploited. The problem is that people are willing to work at such low pay rates and hence the poster doesn’t raise the rates. I don’t know how I can control others from doing such low paying work but at least I have stopped myself and am trying other better paying opportunities or business that gives me freedom from working for others.

As it’s democracy in India, government cannot monitor and control the minimum pay rates at which people will work. Presently I don’t have any solution of getting the pay rates increased at the Mturk and other freelancing sites; only the workers/freelancers collectively can find a solution for getting better payments. However, I can assure you that there are people who are expert in their niche work and they get excellent rates that they demand. The only thing is that they can do certain type and quality of work that sets them above the rest.

Kindly subscribe to my blog posts and you will automatically get the new posts at your email address after filling in the email address in the subscription box and then verifying your email address.

Saravanan February 6th, 2010 at 2:27 pm

good review. now am working in mturk currently i hav earned 15$ in mturk. being Indian we hav to opt for cheque only, hence can i know which bank in chennai can i access the check i receive from mturk in future.

rajeshmago February 6th, 2010 at 3:11 pm

Saravanan: Thanks for finding the review good. You can deposit the cheque received from Mturk similar to the other cheques that you deposit in your account. Just sign at the back (Payee Endorsement) before depositing the cheque. Also, the name on the cheque should match with your name in the bank account. There was nothing special with the cheque received from Mturk as it was payable at all Citibank branches in India (at time when I used to receive them, i.e., more than an year back). It should be same now also. Withdraw when you have more money preferably more than $100 as you will receive $ 4 less (Mturk cheque sending charges). Please check more about the same (payment to Indian workers and Mturk cheque sending commission) at Mturk as I am not working on assignments at Mturk from more than an year now.

Arun February 11th, 2010 at 2:22 pm

Hello Rajesh. Is there any other way to earn money online other than Mturk? I have tried freelance websites but its very difficult to win the projects. Any advice will be highly appreciated. Thanks again.

rajeshmago February 11th, 2010 at 3:43 pm

@Arun: If you are asking me freelancing websites, where you can get the work, I am sorry, I can’t recommend any as of now. But, yes, it takes time to build your reputation at freelancing sites, so try for some more time and see if you can make your profile more impressive. Or, you can try building your own site (free one) and then marketing it. You will definitely get assignments if you have solid work to show to the prospective customers.

People are contacting me from contact form of this blog asking me to work on their projects, it’s matter of time. If you are finding it tough to find work online, try offline options, getting work offline from real world is easier and more reliable.

There are lot of ways of earning money online, the only thing is to find the right opportunity or build the right one (product, service in demand). And, it requires more patience and efforts to get business from your own source as compared to offline world, the main reasons being traffic and competition.

If you are good at writing, you can contact me for writing computer related articles for me. But I am pretty hard as I want quality work, the rates being same as the prevailing market rates. Other users can also contact me if they want to write computer related articles with topics provided by me. The likely time when I will start getting the articles written is in next one month! I will also make a formal post soon in this regard.

selva February 11th, 2010 at 8:02 pm

But textbroker.com is only for US people. In registration page it has only US option in the country list.

rajeshmago February 11th, 2010 at 8:43 pm

@Selva: My mistake, I didn’t check that textbroker.com is not open to Non US writers. I edited the post to correct it. Thanks for pointing it out!

Rahul March 9th, 2010 at 12:05 pm

Today i decided to join Mturk and i go to the register page, what i see their in the country box where we use to select country is been disable and by default its indicates to US only so my question is how i will register to Mturk as i am a indian user.pls Help me…

rajeshmago March 9th, 2010 at 12:19 pm

@Rahul: I did a fresh incomplete registration right now to check if India is listed in the country list and I found no issues as India was there along with lot of other countries. I was able to select India, no issues as of now! Clear your browser cache and cookies etc. and try again.

RAHUL March 9th, 2010 at 5:18 pm

Thanks Rajesh! Finally I got registered in Mturk.
Will you help me to give some tips as I am new to Mturk and want to know what kind of HITS to do in the beginning??

rajeshmago March 10th, 2010 at 8:14 am

@Rahul: As I stopped working at Mturk from more than one year, I can’t give you current and updated tips. However, there is no harm in checking out this post that I wrote about an year back; this post has the tips that might still help the workers at Mturk in earning more money from the HITS: http://www.pctipstricks.com/my-expert-tips-on-earning-more-from-mturk-as-a-worker

Rahul March 10th, 2010 at 11:46 am

Thanks for ur support

imyideas March 16th, 2010 at 12:03 pm

Hi..
Thanks for your review. I was searching for mturk review in google and luckily ended up in your blog. A nice review from you.
Today only i joined mturk when one of my friend told me about this. He is also from india. He is expecting a cheque from them. I am in confusion whether to work with mturk or not. I am a blogger and runs a blog for

rajeshmago March 16th, 2010 at 12:48 pm

@imyideas: The decision to work or not work at Mturk has to be taken by you :) I wrote my experiences to help people and if you feel that the prospective income from Mturk is worth your time, do it and if $3-5 per hour typically (no guarantees from my side) is not worth your efforts, don’t do it. All the best for whatever you decide!

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