MTURK easy money or not?

I have been a turker for about two weeks now and have earned around 12 dollars. I am from outside the US so I have to accept amazon.com coupons. That is fine, as I buy quite a few books from the site. I do think that you need to pick and choose carefully between tasks. Some involve a large amount of work, relative to the reward - they are not worth it. Some low paid tasks take a couple of seconds and can be fun. After a while, I found it easy enough to tell which are worth doing. Now that I am getting into the swing of the site, I am looking to take in tasks that pay a little more. E.g. audio transcriptions can pay well, but is a little daunting at the start with all of the rules to follow. Taking qualification tests is worthwhile, they are often simple and give access to a much wider range of tasks. (I am suspicious of some tasks that require sign up to sites including your credit card information.) Like many online sites, I would guess that turkers are sometimes paid relatively little compared to the value of their work. But I think that is true of many online opportunities to earn money. The large market of people willing to do this kind of work drives rates down. You need to accept that unless you have specific skills that few others have, you are unlikely to earn anything beyond some extra money. I think the site is very fair and transparent as regards the services it provides.

In my first month on Mturk, I had made $300 solely because I got the Askville and Ask a question HITs which are very rewarding but qualifying for them is equally difficult. Many of the HITs on Mturk are exploitative in nature because the pay rate is not very high and the scam rate is also quite high. But then, there are a lot many HITs like the one by PhotoMod which are very interesting and getting money for doing such simple and interesting HITs is always a welcome thing. For me, Mturk rocks!! They only need to define specific pay rates for tasks so that the minimum wage can be attained by turkers who spend good enough time on the website.

I am member of mturk and have $11 in my account...I don't go there often as I find the task little boring to do...most time i get job like find relevant blog of site for so and so company or contact details for them which is more time conserving but site is good and one with little effort and hard work can make good money from there.I have planned that i'll work there 2 hours on my weekend.

i think microworkers is also good. i feel better microwerkers then mturk.i earned more than $30 from there. see my profile for the link good luck

thanks for the information dear. let me tell you that I am a member of that mturk but was never felt motivated to perform a task out there. The reason as you have rightly said was there too low payments. whenever I tried to do something there Either I was not eligible because I was a newcomer or I didn't find the work that was being compensated judiciously. As they are a part of Amazon so I think they would be playing a fair game. But one more thing that stuck me is the mode of payment. It seems the worker is at the mercy of the employer. What if he or she deny your payment and/or find your work is not satisfying after one has completed the assignment. what is your experience??

Yeah i use amazon mechanical turk too, its ok if your just trying to make some extra income, i only do it sometimes though. But look at it like this, i used to typset business cards for a printing company,i typeset 50 or more jobs per hour at 11.00 per hour, so that's about 22 cents per order or less. My work was much harder than whats on turk, so if you can do that many jobs every day for a few hours on amazon mechanical turk a day i guess that could possibly add up to a paycheck. Its pretty fun though when you take the time out to do it.

Mturk is a pretty good site to earn additional income online. I have been a member for quite some time but I am not very much active on the site. I think I should allot some time to work on Mturk. Though it is a little unfair, I find it fun to work on the site.