Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service has a mixed reputation. Some see it as a way to turn found time into easy spending money. Others view it as crowdsourced slave labor.
While the majority of Mechanical Turk workers make very little money doing repetitive tasks like identifying images or taking surveys (and often give up on the platform entirely), there are some who have optimized the process to actually generate decent incomes.
By studying the time-to-pay ratios of certain tasks and using basic tech tools to sift through millions of tiny jobs constantly posted to mTurk, so-called “Alpha Turkers” can turn small pockets of spare time into $200-$500 a week, which isn’t bad if you also have a full-time income.
This week on 2 Girls 1 Podcast, Alli and Jen (actors who perform weird internet content on stage) talk with Mike Naab, a longtime mTurker who makes decent money from the platform, and wrote the ebook Side Hustle From Home: How To Make Money Online With Amazon Mechanical Turk to help others do the same.
Naab shares his tips, tricks, tools, and philosophies about mTurk, how he’s leveraged it to his advantage, and why it’s probably not for everyone.
Listen to episode 101 of #2G1P right here:
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2 Girls 1 Podcast is hosted by Allison Goldberg and Jennifer Jamula, and is produced and edited by Matt Silverman in New York City. Production assistance is provided by the Podglomerate.
