MTurk Review: Is Amazon Mechanical Turk Legit and Worth It?

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a “crowdsourcing marketplace” that’s owned and operated by Amazon. It connects gig workers with businesses who are looking to outsource small tasks to a human workforce instead of just trying to automate them.

Businesses, universities, and researchers, known as “Requesters,” can advertise what MTurk calls “microtasks.” This term refers to small jobs that users can complete in their browsers.

When a Requester uploads a project to the site, MTurk breaks it down into smaller jobs, which freelancers work on piece-by-piece.

For example, consider an image recognition project that consists of tagging 5,000 photos according to what they depict. MTurk won’t allow any one user to claim the entire project; instead, it’ll present 5,000 separate microtasks, each consisting of tagging just one image, to many different freelancers.

What tasks can you do on MTurk?

Jobs on MTurk are called human intelligence tasks (HITs). There’s a wide range of tasks you can take on, with some of the most common including:

• Taking surveys (e.g., for market research)
• Transcribing audio or video content
• Tagging and categorizing products
• Writing product descriptions
• Locating information (e.g., the website/URL for a particular business)
• Rating images based on their quality
• Identifying particular elements, such as animals, in photos

As you may have already guessed, many (although not all) of the tasks on MTurk are ultimately meant to train AIs to recognize images or parse text. The platform is heavily frequented by AI researchers and companies in the data and machine learning industries.

Regardless of what they are, all tasks on MTurk can be completed within your web browser, and most take just a few seconds to a few (1–5) minutes to complete. Virtually all can be completed within an hour, and tasks that stretch even that long are extremely rare.

How do you accept and complete jobs on MTurk?

Once you sign up for MTurk and set up your profile, you can visit the HITs page on the site, which will show the tasks you’re qualified to work on.

If you find one you want to accept, just click on the “Accept & Work” button.

After completing the HIT according to the Requester’s instructions, click the “Submit HIT” button. You’ll then be presented with other, similar HITs you can choose to accept.

Each task’s Requester will check over your work and decide whether to approve it or not. If all goes well, they’ll pay you within 30 days of you submitting the HIT.

Note that workers also decide the allotted time limit for completing HITs. Once you accept a gig, a timer will count down how long you have until you finish it. If you don’t complete the HIT in time, it’ll get passed to another user.

MTurk’s rating system

After you complete a task, the Requester has the chance to rate you positively or negatively based on how well you did. It’s very important to maintain a high approval rating, since it affects how many jobs you’ll be offered.

Unfortunately, some unscrupulous clients have been known to give unfairly negative ratings. As mentioned, we’ll elaborate on this below.

How many HITs can you complete in a day?

MTurk sets a limit on the number of HITs you can accept per day. The goal is to ensure that tasks are completed by humans and free from automation and scripts.

During your 10-day induction (trial) period, you’ll be able to accept a maximum of 100 HITs per day. After you’re accepted permanently onto the platform, this will go up to 3,800 per day.

Note that some HITs are only available to users with a certain number of completed jobs. This means that the longer you spend on the platform, the easier it will get to land work.

Given that jobs on MTurk are called “microtasks,” it probably won’t surprise you to learn that most of them don’t pay very much.

Payouts vary from task to task, but many HITs pay just around $0.05 (5 cents). Others pay $1–$2. Very few pay significantly more than that.

How much can you make per hour?

Amazon doesn’t publish statistics on the average hourly rate that MTurk workers earn, but there’s still a fair amount of data on this. According to a 2018 academic study, at that time, MTurk workers “earned a median hourly wage of only ~$2/h, and only 4% earned more than $7.25/h.” 1

Although that study is over 5 years old at this point, anecdotal reports suggest that earnings on MTurk are trending down, not up. Many people report making as little as $5 per day; while there are people who claim to make $100–$300 per week, most of them also report spending all day on the site and using automated programs to scrape it and alert them when particularly lucrative jobs are posted.

The bottom line is that, while it’s hard to predict exactly what you’ll make on MTurk, you almost certainly will make under minimum wage, and it’s possible you’ll make as little as $2 per hour.

Some people enjoy using sites like MTurk, and you might be one of them, but it isn’t a good option if your primary goal is to earn as much as possible.

What affects your earnings on MTurk?

There are several factors that affect how lucrative the tasks you’ll get on MTurk will be:

• How many HITs you’ve done: As mentioned earlier, some tasks are only available to those who have already completed a certain number of HITs. Hitting milestones such as 100, 500, or 1,000 HITs, coupled with maintaining a strong approval rating, will give you access to higher-paying tasks.
• Your qualification level: Amazon offers a “Masters Qualification” that gives you access to more HITs. To be eligible, you need to complete at least 1,000 HITs and maintain an approval rating of at least 99%. Unfortunately, you can’t apply to get certified; MTurk automatically awards this credential to users who score the highest in their performance reviews.
• Bonuses: Some Requesters may also pay a bonus on top of the agreed rate for completing their HIT. Whether or not you receive a bonus and how much you get is at the discretion of the Requester, so there’s no guarantee of earnings.

All of this can substantially affect your profit potential on the site, particularly how many HITs you’ve completed. Many Requesters simply will not accept work from those who’ve completed fewer HITs, so getting started on the site can be slow.

Unfortunately, many contemporary users complain about a lack of jobs available on MTurk. This suggests that it might be hard for you to complete enough HITs to access the higher-paying gigs.

How will MTurk pay you?

Once a Requester approves your HIT, MTurk will display your earnings on your Dashboard and Earnings pages, and you’ll be able to cash out. You can choose whether to receive your payment as:

• Cash (transferred to your bank account)
• Amazon gift cards

For new users, there’s a 10-day waiting period after you complete your first HIT before you can transfer your earnings.

All Amazon Mechanical Turk workers must be at least 18 years old. Beyond that, there are no requirements. Virtually anyone can earn money on MTurk.

The site doesn’t have any geographic requirements—you can do this job from anywhere—but you need a US bank account to receive your earnings through direct deposit. If you don’t mind cashing out your earnings as gift cards, you don’t need to worry about that requirement.

How “Qualifications” work on MTurk

You don’t need any formal qualifications to accept jobs on MTurk, but some jobs are only available to people with certain skills, credentials, or traits. MTurk calls these criteria “Qualifications.”

Basic qualifications

Qualifications on MTurk often relate to:

• Your demographics or location: Some customers may request workers who fit a certain profile, such as “women aged 18–30 living in California.” MTurk collects this info from you when you sign up.
• What content you’re willing to see: In your MTurk profile, there’s an option you can click to indicate whether you’re willing to see adult content, such as photos that may feature nudity. If you select this, you’ll open up more jobs—in particular, microtasks that involve content moderation (flagging inappropriate social media images).
• Your credentials: Some customers may also ask to be paired with workers with certain real-world credentials. For instance, medical companies conducting market research surveys may stipulate that respondents should be doctors or nurses, etc. All of this info is self-reported, and MTurk probably won’t check to verify that you’re exactly who you say you are, although we don’t recommend lying. (If you do and MTurk catches you, they’ll probably kick you off the platform entirely, and you may forfeit your earnings.)

Masters and Closed Qualifications

We’ve already talked about MTurk’s “Masters Qualification” status, which it applies automatically to its top workers.

It also has additional “Closed Qualifications.” This is a feature that lets companies prioritize certain people for their microtasks.

How this works: Sometimes, you’ll see “Qualification HITs,” which are projects that are meant to test workers. If you accept one of these and do a good job, the company may elect to grant you a Closed Qualification, which means you’ll be given priority access to their future jobs.

Unfortunately, you can’t go out looking for Qualification HITs—you just have to snap them up when you see them. It’s a good idea to do so, since getting lots of Closed Qualifications is key to increasing your earnings on the platform.

To get started with MTurk, you’ll need to create an account on their Worker page. Click “Get Started with Amazon Mechanical Turk,” then click “Request a Worker account.”

You’ll need to sign in with your Amazon account (which also means you’ll need to create one if you don’t already have one).

Amazon will ask for your:

• Full legal name
• Email
• Phone number
• Address

After providing all of that, you must choose a password and agree to the Amazon Mechanical Turk Participation Agreement.

You’ll also need to provide your billing address, as well as your bank details.

MTurk will ask you to create an account with Amazon Payments for tax purposes and to conduct an identity check. It will generally take up to three business days for your account to be approved; once it is, you can start accepting HITs right away.

Amazon MTurk is a popular platform for fairly obvious reasons. It has an extremely low barrier to entry, and you can complete tasks on it from anywhere, with no special credentials or equipment. All you need is a laptop or smartphone and the willingness to work.

However, a website being easy doesn’t necessarily make it worthwhile. Unfortunately, the data on how much you can realistically earn from MTurk is pretty pessimistic.

To reiterate, your earnings are likely to be no higher than $2 per hour. That means that if you spend several hours on the site every day, you’ll take home an extra $6–$8 per day, or a few dozen dollars per week. That isn’t nothing, but it also isn’t much, and it makes it hard to recommend this platform.

The good news is that if you feel like giving MTurk a try, you have almost nothing to lose. The site doesn’t require you to commit to working a set number of hours per week, so you can take it for a spin and stick with it if you’re somehow able to earn more than the average. If your experience is disappointing, you can simply stop using it.

What real users say about MTurk

If you’re still on the fence, it can be helpful to see what people who have been there and done that have to say. Here’s a quick round-up of what people are saying about MTurk on various online message boards, such as Reddit.

Case A: MTurk can be worth using if you keep your expectations realistic

One user on the Reddit community r/mturk/ (which isn’t run by Amazon or officially affiliated with MTurk) writes that whether the platform is worth it “depends on your expectations.”

They note that in the past, users were feasibly able to make hundreds of hundreds of dollars per week from the site, but that those days are over.

However, they write that MTurk’s payouts still compare favorably to what you’ll find from other microtasking platforms, “where ten surveys get you nine screenouts and one payout of 37 cents for 15 minutes.” (A “screenout” is a survey or task that fails, paying you nothing. We’ve tested and reviewed a number of sites that have this issue, and while this description is harsh, it’s accurate; see our review of Zap Surveys for an example of one platform like this.)

The user concludes by saying that if you do use MTurk, do your best to test into Closed Qualifications, which are “key” to your earnings, and avoid unscrupulous clients.

Case B: Some bad-faith clients unfairly reject HITs, damaging your rating

That point brings us to one of the biggest problems with MTurk, aside from the low hourly rate: although the platform itself is legitimate, some of the clients on it aren’t.

In particular, users in more than a few Reddit threads complain that some clients erroneously reject many of their HITs, or purposefully make them impossible to complete.

Clients can do this with underhanded techniques like asking you to tag a series of five images, and deliberately embedding the fifth one incorrectly so that it doesn’t load. They then reject your HIT based on your failure to tag all five, which means they don’t have to pay you but can still benefit from your work on the first four.

If you fall victim to this kind of scam, it will obviously waste your time. More seriously, it will damage your completion rate on MTurk, making you appear to be an unreliable worker. This metric heavily affects how many jobs you’ll qualify for, and, reportedly, MTurk isn’t very responsive when workers dispute unfairly rejected HITs, which is a major downside of the platform.

If you decide to use MTurk, search online to get an idea of which clients you should avoid. The clients P9r and Avey are particularly infamous for this sort of behavior, but others may pop up at any time.

Case C: The money on MTurk has almost entirely dried up

A third user on a separate subreddit, who claims to have used MTurk for 6 years and made more than $23,000, writes that the market on MTurk is almost entirely dead—or, in their own words, that it’s “crickets and a waste of time.”

They suggest this is because MTurk originally found success as an AI research platform, and that as menial work in this area (e.g., tagging images) has become less prevalent, the jobs have dried up.

They go on to write that in terms of effort, making $10 on MTurk today is roughly equivalent to making $100 on it a few years ago, and that it simply isn’t a viable side hustle for anyone without a Masters Qualification, which Amazon also rarely gives out these days.

Unfortunately, this report matches our own impression of the platform. The takeaway is that, although it doesn’t hurt to give MTurk a try if you’re interested, you’d probably be better off with one of the many other remote side hustles that don’t require previous experience.