Tag Archives: amazon mechanical turk

I Have Money and I want Headphones

AS THE TITLE SAYS, I have money and I want headphones.

The money’s from MTurk. I’ve been doing three or four little tasks at night, and while the individual tasks don’t pay much (maximum like $2 for any of the ones I do), if you do enough, they add up. I have about $50 from MTurk now, so I’ve decided I can spend that on whatever I want.

But it’s not like I need headphones. I have my awesome Koss ones that cost about $4.50 and I have at least 4 backup pairs of them for when the current ones inevitably break (the sound quality is awesome, but they don’t last too long. $4.50 headphones, yo).

But I logged onto Amazon for whatever the hell reason tonight and it knew I had some extra money ‘cause it was like, “hey bro, y u no buy some Sennheisers?”

And so it’s all Amazon’s fault that I’ve spent the past two hours looking at headphones.

Front runners:

I cannot choose!

Edit: Okay, I ended up not getting any of these. I ended up not getting Sennheisers at all. Instead, I got this guy. I’m super picky about comfort when it comes to headphones, and a good number of the reviews for these headphones said that they were really, really comfortable. Plus they’re supposed to sound good. And they’re a cool shade of blue.

In This Blog: Claudia Plugs Amazon Mechanical Turk

Ahoy again, faithful readers! (Who probably won’t see this until June when I finally post the damn thing…)

So there’s a site called Mechanical Turk that is run by Amazon. Basically, you can sign up as a worker and do tasks for requesters. Usually the requester’s tasks are things like answering survey questions or other things for companies/universities/etc. If you qualify and complete a task, you get paid by the requester.

So far this totally sounds like a “make money quick” website that’s in actuality a scam, but it’s not! It’s legitimately run through Amazon and you actually do get paid (without giving away your personal information or anything like that). I’ve been using it since mid-2014 (and I actually don’t know why I’ve never blogged about it before) and haven’t had a single issue with it being any sort of scam.

And while you do earn legit money, you definitely don’t earn a lot very quickly, especially if you just do the tasks in your spare time. For example, since the middle of last year when I started using it, I’ve earned a total of $171. The biggest payment for a task that I’ve ever done is $4.00, but most of the ones I do are worth a dollar or 80 cents or something like that. If you take a qualifying test you can be allowed to work on the audio transcription tasks, which are usually worth a lot more ($40+), but I haven’t done that yet because I’m too lazy to do transcriptions, haha.

But yeah, $171 is better than nothing, and it gives you something to do if you have a spare few minutes every night or something like that. And like I said, it’s actually legitimate, and a good way to earn a bit of spare money if you wanted to.

WOO!