Amazon Mechanical Turk - Get Paid To Look At Photos

[jeffrey]

There is a new site sponsored by Amazon called <a href="http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome"> Amazon Mechanical Turk </a>. Although it's currently in Beta, it is live and paying for doing such things as looking at photos. Why would a company pay you to do this? The basic reasoning behind the program is that although computers can do most tasks more efficiently than humans can, there are certain tasks where humans out-perform computers. An example of this would be picking out an object within a photograph.

My basic feeling on "get paid to..." schemes on the Internet is that 99.9% of them are scams and a waste of your time. This one is a bit different and may be worth checking out for a number of reasons:

1. It's not an affiliate program.
2. Recruiting others is not a main source of the income you earn (in fact, there is no benefit for recruiting others
3. It's being set up by a known company with a good track record.

I signed up, but the site is experiencing a heavy traffic load at the moment and I kept getting the following message as I surfed the site:

<blockquote><i>"Your request was not completed successfully. Please try it again. If you continue to receive this message, please try your request again later."</blockquote></i>

I did manage to complete a couple of tasks and received a message that my answers are under review for payment. The pay was minimal ($0.03 for each task), but only involved picking the best photo from a group of 5. Had the server been working properly, it would have taken less than a minute to complete - I ended up spending about 5 minutes getting the task done with the problem.

You're not going to make a ton of money doing this, but it may be a way to earn an extra buck or two if Amazon can attract a good base of companies wanting to use the service and can get them to raise the pay per task a bit more.

You can get more information from their <a href="http://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=whatis"> Frequently Asked Questions </a>

[Bruce Wayne]

Re: Amazon Mechanical Turk - Get Paid To Look At Photos

It reminds me of those paid to read email websites that could earn you a couple of dollars it you spent all day reading emails. It'll be interesting to see if this turns out to be any different. I guess with Amazon backing it a certain credence is added straight away.

[robby]

Re: Amazon Mechanical Turk - Get Paid To Look At Photos

Thanks for the link. I'm having trouble getting the pages to load, too, but I will try again later.

[Fern]

Re: Amazon Mechanical Turk - Get Paid To Look At Photos

I don't know, I'm leery of this one, Jeffrey, especially since you need to hand over your BANK ACCT # for them to pay you.

If they were going to pay you, why not do a check? This seems highly suspicious to me.

[jeffrey]

Re: Amazon Mechanical Turk - Get Paid To Look At Photos

I don't know, I'm leery of this one, Jeffrey, especially since you need to hand over your BANK ACCT # for them to pay you.

If they were going to pay you, why not do a check? This seems highly suspicious to me.

Hmmm, can you link me to where that is required. I didn't go through the whole process of looking for payment method because I thought I had seen that they would place payments into your Amazon acct - maybe I misread somewhere.