Last experiment of the day with little ways to make side money online: Amazon Mechanical Turk. I’d signed up a while back but not played with it much; today, I logged in and poked around some more.
What I found: A lot of this is spammy and asks you to sign up for offers, etc. Some of the offers ask you to do things like post their spammy links to your Facebook profile (don’t). Others pay you a penny or so to go to a website and vote in a contest (not quite fair, is it). So, be careful what you click on and what types of information you give out.
The tasks, or “HITS” that seem more legitimate are those that require more time and effort, such as writing articles. I managed to accept a HIT, take 20 minutes to write an article, and then accidentally clicked “return HIT” rather than “submit.” Returning the HIT puts it back in the pool for someone else, and then I couldn’t find it again. Gah!
So, had I done it right, I would have made $2.00 for 20 minutes of work. That’s not super, but apparently as you complete more of these tasks your rating improves and you get a chance at better-paying projects. Me, I just wasted 20 minutes. 🙂 I’ll try again, and report back next Saturday on how the week progressed.
Update: I just played with some of the quick tasks some more. Spent 13 minutes total and: Entered identifying info from the covers of 9 comic books (made $.27), took a survey (made $.20), answered two questions ($.16), and gave someone my ZIP code location ($.01). That’s $.64 in 13 minutes, or less than $2.00 an hour. Hmm. Of course, some of this time was my getting used to the system…