Why Amazon Mechanical Turk is a waste of time – UK Review

Would you like the opportunity to earn less than minimum wage, doing a variety of frustrating and boring online tasks, all in order to be paid in vouchers you can’t really spend?

Well you’re in luck: Amazon MTurk is the site for you!

If you haven’t heard of it, Amazon Mechanical Turk (or MTurk for short) is a site where workers can earn money by completing small online jobs. There are thousands of tasks available, which include things like data entry, identifying images, or finding information on the internet.

Backed by Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, MTurk workers can earn money for each online task they complete. At first glance, it seems like promising way to make some sweet moolah in your spare time.

But let me cut to the chase: I’ve tried MTurk for myself and I don’t think it’s a viable earning method for people based in the UK – even as a way to earn some pocket money. In this article I’ll explain exactly why it’s so disappointing.

But first, you’re wondering why it’s called Mechanical Turk, aren’t you?

Why is it called Mechanical Turk?

In their FAQs, Amazon explain that the name is to do with a Hungarian nobleman by the name of Wolfgang von Kempelen. Back in the eighteenth century he invented a chess machine, which he called his “Turk”, that amazed crowds all over Europe by beating nearly every opponent it faced. Whilst audiences believed it was an incredible feat of engineering, it was actually just an elaborate-looking machine with a chess master hidden inside.

As it turns out, this is a fitting analogy for my whole MTurk experience. It looks clever and promising at first glance but, once you take a proper glimpse inside, it’s a letdown.

Here are the four key reasons why I’ve decided MTurk is not viable in the UK as a money-making method. I must stress that my opinion is based on a combination of all four reasons – but particularly the last one.

1. Finding tasks to do on Amazon MTurk is frustrating

MTurk isn’t a platform that you can just set up and use within a couple of minutes. You need to create an account and be accepted, which can take a little while. For some countries of residence, it seems that you can be denied an account based on location alone.

Fortunately, as a UK user, I was accepted fairly quickly and easily. Being from a native English-speaking country probably helps.

Once you’re in, you’ll see a list of jobs, called “HITs” (Human Intelligence Tasks) like the screenshot below. As a new user, you’re unable to accept a vast number of them. The fact is: the better-paid and more skilled tasks are trusted to workers who have proved themselves over thousands of jobs already.

Newcomers are right at the bottom of the pecking order, and expected to feed off any crumbs to climb the ranks. This typically means that you get the most boring and worst paid jobs until you are established on the site.

Unfortunately, you’ll never qualify for some jobs, as they are reserved specifically for people that live in the US. Frustratingly, it seems that some of the most interesting and best paid tasks fall into this category.

Aside from getting more experience, you can expand the range of jobs available to you by gaining qualifications on MTurk. For example, you can do the task below if you take and pass an English language test. But that’s yet more time you have to invest before you’re even making any money. And speaking of money…..

2. It’s difficult to make much money on MTurk

People often ask how much money you can make on MTurk. The answer to this will clearly vary from person to person, but in my experience the pay is poor.

Even as a UK worker, all jobs are priced in US dollars. Most of the time, jobs are just worth a few cents each, for example:

• 3 cents to transcribe a receipt.
• 1 cent to search the internet for a model number of 10 different items.

It’s difficult to equate these to an hourly rate, as you don’t know exactly how quickly you’re going to be able to do the tasks. What was clear to me, however, is that it’s difficult to make good money. For example, even if you can transcribe two receipts a minute (which would be pretty good going in my experience) then at just 3 cents a receipt you’re making $3.60 per hour.

And that’s assuming that you maintain steely focus the whole time, don’t take any breaks, and manage to avoid any receipts which are illegible. In practice that’s unrealistic.

Your reaction when you find a task that actually looks like it pays a decent rate…

Some people claim to make hundreds of pounds a month through MTurk, which seems impressive. But I worked for hours and didn’t even make a minimum wage. I’m not sure Amazon would care too much – after all, there are plenty of people who do seem to be completing tasks at the prices offered.

However, with rates of pay like this, I’m left questioning who MTurk is aimed at. I can only think there are three possible groups of people finding this viable:

• People from low-wage countries. From what I’ve heard, MTurk has restricted applications from many such countries as the quality of work has been poor.
• People who are clever enough to automate tasks using scripts. That’s not me and, unless you have some serious knowledge, it’s probably not you either.
• People who are desperate! You might only make a few dollars an hour, but where else can you (legally) make that at 2am to pay your overdue rent?

Apparently once you’ve done enough of the crappy jobs (over 1,000) then you’ll be shown the higher paying jobs. Do the poor jobs well, and your score (measured as a percentage of rejected tasks) will determine whether you get better quality jobs. But even if you get the quality jobs, you may still find you don’t earn great money.

3. MTurk jobs are often super boring

If your idea of fun is transcribing audio recordings and receipts, you’re going to have a fantastic time on MTurk. For the rest of us, it’s likely to be really boring.

You have to understand that MTurk is a site that people can submit repetitive tasks that require human intelligence to complete. They’re the sort of jobs that would better fit artificial intelligence, but technology isn’t there, or is too expensive to adapt for that task. So, in essence, you’re the computer doing the repetitive task.

Truthfully, of the hundreds of HITs I completed, some were interesting but these were in the minority.

Most of the time, I was bored to tears.

4. You can’t easily withdraw MTurk earnings

So, you’ve dug deep and completed many hours worth of tasks. You now have money to withdraw. As a UK user, you’ll be looking at a screen with two payment options:

Let me save you the annoyance in advance: there is currently no way to use the first option and withdraw actual money from MTurk if you’re in the UK. This is the single biggest reason why MTurk is a waste of time.

If you were in the US, you’d be able to withdraw money, but you’re not and that’s the end of the story as far as Amazon seems concerned. They don’t even have Paypal transfers, which is quite astonishing, because this is basic technology used by many other sites.

I know what you’re thinking: “No problem, I’ll just take the Amazon voucher instead”. Sadly you can only have Amazon.com gift cards, which restricts you to purchases on their US site. Many US sellers won’t even ship to the UK. And those who do are likely to charge insane amounts for shipping.

The only viable options seem to be to buy digital gift cards (e.g. Xbox or Playstation network) on Amazon.com and then either use them yourself or try to sell them on another website. Selling gift cards can be fraught with problems and, even if it goes well, you’re still not going to get anyone to pay much more than about 80% of their face value.

For me, that’s too much hassle to be doing on a regular basis. MTurk is so poorly paid already. Factoring in another 30 mins of back-and-forth trying to sell $20 of vouchers at 80% value is the nail in the coffin for this as a viable money-maker.

Conclusion: MTurk doesn’t seem like a viable earning method for UK users

As I said at the start, I found MTurk to be a platform where you’ll be earning less than minimum wage doing a variety of frustrating and boring tasks and, to top it all off, you can only get paid in vouchers for an American shopping website that you can’t realistically use.

Personally, I won’t even consider using it again until MTurk are prepared to make actual cash payments to UK workers. Even then, I found it so badly paid and unexciting that I wouldn’t be rushing back with enthusiasm.

I’m not going to sit on the fence on this one: my voyage into using MTurk has felt like a waste of time. Of all the potential online money-making methods available to us in the UK, this ranks towards the bottom.

Personally, I’ll be moving on to other more solid online earning methods. In the meantime, I’ve still got to find someone who wants to buy twelve dollars of Amazon.com vouchers from me…