A couple of months ago I started Amazon's MTURK program where people can earn money online doing artificial artificial intelligence tasks (known as HITS). So far, it's been a great experience. I have earned over $400 in 8 weeks and through my online forums/groups, I have seen that people can make way more money than this as well. It pays pretty quickly and there are a variety of tasks that you can do. Some of the HITS are known as "batches" or batch jobs and new Mturkers are always asking about these HITS so I thought I'd share a little about thes HITs. (If you are interested in learning more about MTURK and how you can make money quickly online through it, you can check out my other MTURK posts)
What are "batches" or batch jobs?
Batches are just Mturk HITS (tasks) in which there are a lot of them available and each worker can do multiple HITS in that batch of HITS.Typical Characteristics of a Batch Job
- Typically batch jobs only pay a few or several cents per HIT (but a few days ago we stumbled across one that was $1.50 per HIT and it was super easy)
- Typically each HIT in a batch HIT can be done very quickly (a few minutes or less)
Why Would I Want to Do a Batch Job if they pay so little?
- They are quick so you can knock out a lot in a little amount of time
- They help you build up your HIT numbers, meaning that your number of HITS approved/submitted can go up very quickly with these types of HITS. Many tasks require a certain amount of HITS to have been approved to get access to them. Basically, you are opened up to many more HITS the more HIT approvals you have. You often see qualifications listed on a HIT that say (1000, 5000, or 10000 HIT approved to qualify) so aim to reach these milestones as quickly as you can. It took me 8 weeks to reach 1000 approved HITs but I've seen people (in my MTURK groups) reach that goal much more quickly than that.
How do you find batches jobs?
Manual Search:
The most basic way to find batches is just to do a search on MTURK and choose the "sort by" option of "hits available - most first"
Forums/Groups
There are many forums or online groups that have threads where people post about good batches that pop up throughout the day. If you are in MTURK, be sure to join a forum or group as I have found them very helpful for finding batches or just learning how to be more efficient at "turking" with MTURK.Here are a few popular forums and groups:
- Mturkgrind
- TurkerNation
- MTurkForum
- MTURK Members (this is a Facebook group and it's the one I keep up/logged into throughout my day for tips, and members post links to HITs throughout the day in their daily "pinned" post)
- Also check out Reddit as well as they have a "Hits Worth Turking For" thread
Scripts
Once you find some great batch jobs (or non batch HITs as well), you can use scripts such as Turkmaster or Hit Scraper to notify you when those HITs (or HITs from certain requestors)become available. With Turkmaster, you can also have it automatically accept those HITs for you.What are some popular batch requestors?
There are many requestors who post batch jobs very frequently (sometimes daily, sometimes less than that). Here are a few requestors that you can search for/set your scripts to look for:
- Project Endor's Zoltar HITS - these HITS are evaluating websites. You are given a link and must answer five questions based upon the site. I average about 1-2 minutes a piece for these and right now they are paying 12 cents a HIT. Search for Zoltar or Project Endor to get these but Project Endor also has other types of HITs as well. From my online sources, I've learned that this requestor is from Google.
- Sergey Smith (this requestor is very popular. The HITS vary, but a few days ago, my son and I happened upon HITs from this requestor that were $1.50 a piece and all you had to do was rate 20 channels and tell if they were trashy. These probably took about 1-2 minutes as well, so they were quite a find.
- Jon Brelig (these HITs are doing data entry of store receipts. They pay around .03-.05 a piece. Now, I generally didn't like doing store receipts because there are some where you have to enter each item on a grocery receipt, the price, product number, etc, but now I have found that there are HITs from this requestor where you may just have to enter the business name or another HIT where you just have to select the date of purchase from a drop down window. So these go much quicker and you may do something like 12-24 receipts in one HIT for these)
- Mountain - I only saw these one time but people talk about them from time to time so these are worth watching for. The time my son and I did these, you had to look at video frames and tell if a certain object (like a motorcycle) was in the frame and you might have had 10 frames of 10 videos. They were quick and easy and they paid .70 a HIT so those are well sought after.
And here are a few others that I have heard people mention but I am not sure if I have ever done any of their HITs:
- John Smith
- p9r
- Viral MTURK
