Turking 4 A Living

Today I took a little departure from my normal turking habits. Recently I’ve been concentrating on the higher paying HITs, that I believe can get me close to my $10/hour goal. However, today I really wasn’t in the mood to sit down and do serious Turking. Instead I watched the Orange Bowl and completed mindless $0.01 HITs between plays, during commercials, etc. I look back and I don’t feel like I was working, I enjoyed the game, and I also completed over 400 HITs while watching it! Due to the nature of the work and the pace I chose to do it at, I didn’t come close to my $10/hour goal, but that’s ok because I didn’t feel like I was working at all.

I believe the $2.60 HIT is the highest paying HIT I have worked on so far. This HIT involved re-writing a 1100-1300 word sales page. It was in Microsoft Word format and was to be uploaded as .doc file when I was finished. I was hoping I could complete the re-write in about fifteen minutes. Unfortunately it ended up taking almost thirty minutes, about half of my hourly rate goal.

The $2 HIT was great. They wanted a two-hundred word article on board shorts. I was able to crank out the words in three minutes, making for a $30/hour rate. But as is par for the course on these well paying HITs, there was only one HIT available.

Finally I finished up my day by completing 401 $0.01 HITs. This involved work on some sort of shopping cart system. The HIT would load an image of a product and then list three or four categories. I would select the category that the product best fit into. Most of these took three seconds, but there were several that I had to look up because I had no idea what the product was (a lift kit for a gas powered radio control pickup truck and a blade sharpener for the rotor blades on a radio controlled helicopter for instance).

I received my first Weekly Worker Activity Report from Mechanical Turk on Sunday, January 3, 2010. Turk’s end of week is Saturday, so this report covers all activity Sunday – Saturday. It’s a nice report and I look forward to seeing more of them in the coming weeks. Once I have a little more data, I’ll begin graphing this information so we can track my week over week earnings. I’ll also be incorporating a graph to track my trek towards an hourly rate of $10/hour. Below is my Weekly Mechanical Turk Activity Report that I have formatted into a chart.

This is going to be great when I have two or three more weeks of data and can start plotting this data. If you can’t tell, I’m driven by numbers and graphs. If I can visualize something on a graph or plot my results, I’ll go to great lengths to make that graph look better the next week!

How are you tracking your results withTurk? Do you graph your weekly reports, maybe even graph your daily results? Let me know in the comment section below.

My Dual Monitor Setup

I went ahead and setup the extra LCD monitor that I had laying around the house in a dual monitor configuration with my laptop. I would have preferred a side by side placement, but my desk required a vertical configuration. I’m starting to get used to it though, and I almost prefer it to the side by side that I have at my office. It seems easier for my eyes to scroll up and down than it is side to side.

I’m anticipating this will have a big impact on my hourly rate when performing lots of quick tasks that require referencing multiple windows. It certainly would have helped me with the FBI Files HIT that I did a few days ago. It is certainly not an elaborate setup but it will help out. I’d love to bring my 23″ wide screen from work to replace this old 15″ screen!

What are you guys doing to get your HITs done faster, I’d love to see some nice dual, triple, or even quad monitor setups. What other techniques are you using?

I had another good day Turking with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Using the stopwatch application was eye opening, my hourly rate is a little lower than I anticipated. There were some bright spots and a few HITs that paid very well, unfortunately they ran out very quickly. Experienced Turkers can spot a well paying HIT, this is evident by how fast the HITs are completed. When I started on a particular HIT, there were over 500 HITs available. I was only able to complete 17 before they were all finished.

I worked on two very interesting HITs today. The first was a HIT that involved cataloging old de-classified FBI documents. I was tasked with browsing over a single page PDF file and looking for FBI file numbers. Most pages had two or three file numbers which I could quickly enter into the HIT. I was paid $0.15 for each page and was able to average one page every 45 seconds, which translates to $12/hour. This is certainly a task where I could have greatly benefited from dual monitors.

Another interesting HIT involved looking up vehicles by make and model, mostly BMW’s and Bentley’s, on Wikipedia. When I found the particular model, I was tasked with posting the URL to the page and a direct URL to an image if there was one. This took longer than I anticipated but was an enjoyable HIT.

I’m finally getting back into the swing of things by completing $10/day of Mechanical Turk HITs, and striving for a $10/hour hourly rate. I came very close to the $10/hour rate on the writing HITs today, I completed a few others that were a little slower. I ended spending about an hour and a half earning $8.35. I’m hoping I’ll get bonuses on some of the writing assignments that will push me up over $10 and improve my hourly rate.

I’ve also decided to start charting my hourly rate along with my daily results. I’ll be using a desktop stopwatch application to keep track of the time I’m spending on HITs. This will be much more accurate than the estimates I have been providing thus far. I’ll then be summarizing everything in a weekly roundup that will include information about Acceptance and Rejection rates, along with percentages of approved HITS and those that are still pending. I’ll post the first Weekly Roundup after I receive my weekly results email from Mechanical Turk.

Again today, I concentrated on HITs that paid $1 to $1.50 for two-hundred to four-hundred word articles. This still seems to be the best use of my time that I have found so far. One very well paying HIT involves writing an advertisement for a Language Exchange. This HIT only requires 50 words and pays $0.30, resulting in an excellent hourly rate of around $20/hour. Again, as with the other well paying HIT I found on December 30^th, it seems these HITs are limited and disappear quickly.

Happy New Year everyone and welcome to 2010! I hope everyone had as much fun last night as I did! Due to all the “fun” I had, I didn’t spend much time Turking today! I did get some more website work done and setup my email accounts. If you’d like to contact me directly, you can do so at info@turking4aliving.com or just by leaving a comment below.

Very little to cover today, I wrote one, three hundred word article for $1 and rewrote an article for $0.50. The other two HITs I did were just out of curiosity because I had never done HITs of this type before. The first was finding a link to a PDF owner’s manual for an electric razor ($0.15), the other just wanted some demographic/geographic information for $0.05.

Today was another light day of Turking and a heavy day of installing Wordpress and setting up http://www.turking4aliving.com. I’ve started http://twitter.com/turking4aliving, make sure you follow us to be notified of high paying HITs that I come across. I’m also planning a Facebook page in the coming days.

Today I completed three, three-hundred word articles that each paid $1 apiece. In order to complete these articles at a $10/hour rate, I needed to write the three-hundred words in just under six minutes. I ended up spending about twenty-two minutes on these three articles, so I didn’t quite reach my goal. However, I did receive my first bonus! The Requestor of the three-hundred word articles indicated he liked my writing style and that he would like to send some more work my way. The bonus was only $0.10, but every little bit helps!

The other HIT I did was the same one I completed yesterday, the geographical search rankings in Google. This HIT pays $0.43 for about thirty seconds of work. I’m going to keep an eye on this Requestor, maybe they’ll release a few hundred HITs soon! I’m planning some more website work for the next few days, but should get back to my $10/day HITs starting on Monday.

I didn’t reach my $10/day goal today, instead I spent much of the time I set aside for Turking on setting up this http://www.turking4aliving.com website. It will take a few days to get the groundwork laid, and then I’ll make a few extra dollars a day to stay on track to meet my monthly goal of $310. Speaking of Monthly Goals, I added a progress bar in the left hand column that does a great job showing my progress.

I concentrated more on some of the writing HITs today, mainly as a test to see if I can write quickly enough to make them worthwhile. All of the $0.40 HITs I did today were one hundred word articles. The only criteria were interesting, excellent spelling and grammar, and using a set of key words several times throughout the article. The articles went by quickly, averaging 2-3 minutes for the one hundred words, which comes very close to the $10/hour goal. I’m still looking for HITs that involve writing three or four hundred words for $1.00 – $1.50.

I did find one excellent HIT today, unfortunately I could only complete it once. It was for a company that wanted to check Google Search rankings for a set of web pages in different geographical areas. The HIT paid $0.43 and literally took 30 seconds. That translates to roughly $50/hour, too bad I could only do it once!

I spent about two and a half hours on Mechanical Turk HITs this morning. I ended up meeting my $10/day goal, but it took 2.5 times longer than I would like. That’s ok though, this first month I’m more concerned with completing $10 of HITs each day. Let’s take a look at the work I did today.

The highest paying HIT made up 8% of my goal today, paying $0.80. I was tasked with re-writing an article in my own words. It was around 400 words and took about eight minutes to complete. However, only four minutes was spent writing, the other four minutes were spent reading and referring back to the original article. Based on this, I’d like to find some writing assignments in the 150 – 300 word range, that pay $0.50 to $1.50. If it is a general subject or something I’m knowledgeable about, I believe I can crank out words quickly enough to surpass the $10/hour goal.

I completed a $0.50 HIT that involved writing three reviews of local businesses (of my choice) and submitting them to a website. It sounded promising at first, but by the time I entered all of the information required (phone numbers, addresses, etc) it just took too long to make it worthwhile. $10/hour requires $0.17/minute and this HIT certainly took longer than three minutes.

I spent a significant amount of my time today on a HIT that I worked on yesterday. I made $6.20 by searching for restaurant websites and PDF menu URL’s. I seemed to average around $7 or $8 per hour while completing these HITs. This is certainly a scenario where my dual monitor setup would allow me to surpass the $10/hour goal.

So what am I looking to get out of all of this Turking? I have several goals, both short term and long term. Let’s spend a few minutes going over what I want to get out of Turk in the next 30-60 days.

My initial goal is to earn $10 per day with Mechanical Turk. Ideally, I could do this in about one hour per day, achieving a rate of $10/hour. At first it will likely take me 2 – 3 hours per day to reach the $10 goal. However, I’m banking that my theory of maximizing efficiencies will allow me to reach and possibly surpass the $10/hour goal. Also, as I gain more experience completing these tasks, become a better and faster writer, and minimize errors and rejections, I think that Requestors will begin contacting me directly, offering higher rates of pay, and exclusive HITs for me to complete. Requestors also have the ability to give a bonuses to workers they deem worthy, this will also play into my hourly rate goal.

I’ll be testing out different hardware and software solutions to make myself more efficient and effective while performing Mechanical Turk tasks. For example, I will be setting up dual monitors in my home office this week. Several of the HITs that I have completed lend themselves to dual monitor setups and could have been completed much more quickly if I had them in place.

There are several software applications that I would like to test that are suitable for some of the lower paying, mundane, HITs that require repetitive keystrokes, short phrases, etc. These programs allow programming macros and keyboard shortcuts, which I anticipate will provide quite a boost to my hourly rate.

So that’s what I’m looking to get from Mechanical Turk. Leave a comment below and let me know what your goals are with Mechanical Turk.