mturk tips

If you're new to Mechanical Turk (MTurk) you might want to read the glossary at the end of this article first, or check out the MTurk Wikipedia entry here.

I have yet to find a work-from-home site that pays as well as Amazon's crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk. Here are some of the things I've learned that have increased my success with MTurk.

read, read, read
Read everything you can find online about MTurk - Turkernation, MTurk Forum, and Cloud Me Baby are great sites to start with. Newbies who register and spend time reading through these three forums can expect to find all of their questions answered. Two other sites that I personally find of interest are Experimental Turk and Mturk Tracker.

use greasemonkey scripts
Are you new to Greasemonkey? You have no idea what you've been missing! The MTurk subreddit has a great list of tools that will make your Turking more efficient. Some of my favorite scripts are Today's Projected Earnings, Block Requesters, Expanded Header Info, Requester ID & Auto Approval Time, MTurk Status Page Chart, Block Individual Requests, and the Turk Worker ID Display.

The Pending Earnings script is my most favorite of them all, unfortunately it's been very buggy for me so I had to disable it.

use a timer
MTurk has a timer embedded into the interface for each HIT but I like to be aware of how much time I spend searching for HITs as well. I downloaded a freeware timer for my Mac and I use it to keep track of my searching and to calculate the hourly rate for a HIT. There is also a Greasemonkey script that includes a timer and will calculate your hourly wage on MTurk, but it has been buggy for me.

use turkalert
For me this is a must. Create a free TurkAlert account and build a list of your favorite requesters, then set TurkAlert to email you when new hits are posted. Receive these emails on your cell phone and be ready to work at a moment's notice.

use turkopticon
This is another must. Turkopticon is an MTurk requester rating site that includes a Greasemonkey script that will add a drop-down menu to your HIT search results. You can check the ratings left for requesters by other Turkers - I never do HITs for requesters with poor ratings and I have yet to receive a mass rejection. I also contribute to the ratings for requesters on Turkopticon.

 don't complete penny hits
Plenty of newbies complain about the low rate of pay on MTurk and if you look at any of the forums you'll see this topic comes up frequently. There are also lots of articles online talking about the "slave wages" offered on MTurk. While it's true that many tasks pay a measly $1-$3 dollars per hour, I see the wage debate a little differently. First of all, for some workers outside of the US, $1-$3 per hour is a livable wage and in a global workplace that's an important factor. Second, if you don't want to work for less than minimum wage then simply don't work for less than minimum wage. Don't accept HITs that are not paying the minimum of what you will work for. Pretty simple.

*Wait, you love penny HITs and you are working to get your HIT count up? Then by all means, do them. But please don't complain about the low wages available on MTurk.

do something else when the hits aren't up
In the beginning I spent more time searching for tasks than actually completing them. I realized that large batches of short HITs (my favorite kind) would come and go quickly, so I spent lots of time noodling around on the web to pass the time while waiting for more HITs to become available. I soon realized this was a waste of my time. Now I use tools (shared below) that alert me when my favorite requesters have posted new work and I sit down at the computer at different points throughout the day, only working when work is readily available.

set goals and slowly raise your expectations
I have a daily goal of $20 but I don't always reach it to due my own time constraints and the amount of work available on MTurk. Once I reached 5000 approved HITs better paying tasks opened up to me and at this point I generally average $6-8/hour including search time. I will need to raise this hourly rate considerably over the next few months to meet my long term goals.

persevere
MTurk can be very disheartening in the beginning, which is why so many people give up after the first few weeks of completing HITs. It takes time to find the tasks you are best at and that earn the most for you, to develop a list of your favorite requesters, and to raise your HIT count and keep your approval rating high. I myself am not making what I would like for my Turking but I see great potential for higher earnings in the future and I'm going to stick with it. I hope you will too.

Glossary:
MTurk - Mechanical Turk
HIT - human intelligence task
penny HITs - tasks paying 1 cent each
requester - an individual who offers paid tasks
Turker - an individual completing hits for pay
Turking - searching for and completing hits
batch - a large group of quick hits
mass rejection - when a requester rejects most or all of your hits at once
approval rating - total percentage of hits completed accurately
HIT count - total number of hits approved

Have more tips? Please share them in the comments below!