Review of Amazon's Mechanical Turk

Mechanical Turk, also called MTurk, is Amazon's cloud sourcing work/project site.

MTurk is similar to Facebook's Cloud Crowd and also to the German-owned ClickWorker cloud sourcing sites.

MTurk workers have to pass simple tests and maintain approval ratings by doing acceptable work, in order to be paid a few cents for simple human intelligence tasks, or HITs.

I found getting started to be really frustrating, my HITs kept timing out while I read the directions and a lot of the graphics would not load on my antiquated pc. I ended up earning two cents for my first two hours there. (That's right, two cents for two hours. I almost didn't log back in, but I'm glad I did, I happened on an easy - and interesting - series of HITs and, while still dismal as far as a per hour rate, did make a couple bucks in about 30 minutes.)

A few of the tasks were writing HITs, paying about 25 cents per 50+ words or less, so I would not recommend MTurk as a place a writer will want to hang out for too long if you have any better paying gigs.

If, however, you have been hit hard by negative changes in the online writing world, MTurk is a place where you can earn a little bit of money.