Amazon Mechanical Turk
A few days ago while watching a YouTube video of one internet guru I follow, he mentioned a service I had never heard of. The service was Amazon Mechanical Turk and the guru mentioned that you could get content for your website written quite cheaply there. I decided to check it out and signed up not because I use people to write my content but I thought maybe someone who does could hire me to write some articles for them and I could make some money.
In my research here is what I found about Mechanical Turk or MTurk as it is referred to. As I stated before it is part of Amazon Web Services and is referred to as a crowdsourcing marketplace. Crowdsourcing is when someone or a company takes a task usually performed by an employee and outsources it to a large group of people in the form of an open call. In MTurks case these people or companies known as requesters are looking for tasks called HITS (Human Intelligence Tasks) to be completed by Providers (actually the person doing the work). The provider is then paid by the requester through Amazon. These tasks are things that computers don’t have the ability to do yet, for example look at a picture and identify someone from it, usually a celebrity. One of the most common HITs is for people to rewrite sentences or paragraphs. Usually they want you to rewrite a sentence but make it mean the same thing.
One of the most famous uses of this site was in 2007 when the search was on for missing aviator Steve Fossett. Satellite data was obtained and divided up then Mechanical Turk users were asked to look at images and flag the ones which had foreign objects that could resemble a crash site or other evidence that should be more closely examined. That project didn’t work as the crash site was eventually found a year later by hikers in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
In my opinion it would take a long time to become rich working off of MTurk but for someone who wouldn’t or couldn’t leave their home to work this would be a very good source of income. If you want to bring in a few dollars a week I would recommend you go over and check it out. If you are looking for articles or content to be written for you I suggest you try it and see. The upside would be having a whole pool of writers working for you and that can’t be bad. To learn more about Amazon Mechanical Turk visit their website by clicking on this link: Amazon Mechanical Turk.
