I joined Mechanical Turk two weeks back and have already earned a good amount of money. I had to buy a gift for my boy friend which was too costly and I needed enough money for that in three months time. So, I had begun a search for online jobs. At first I got engaged with a few survey websites but they were not really frequent with the surveys and paid less than what I wanted. Then I came across a blog which had mentioned Mechanical Turk as one of the options for online jobs. I immediately joined it and found it to be the best place for earning online. The tasks were so interesting. I got some really good paying surveys on the site. In addition to that, there were many fun and creative tasks as well. I even wrote a lot many articles for people. Frequency of hits wasn’t a problem at all. I can choose my time of working and the tasks I want to complete. It’s just two weeks and I’m already addicted to the site. I wish to gift my boy friend a (edited to keep surprise) on his birthday which is in September. I’m still short of around $150 but I’m pretty sure that with the rate I’m earning currently, I’ll definitely be able to gift him a (edited to keep surprise) on his birthday. I plan to take gift certificates of Amazon and buy him a good (edited to keep surprise). I’m really thankful to Mechanical Turk for giving me such great tasks and paying me for actually doing those small jobs.

Six months and still no work. I care for my 84 yr old grandmother and am helping to raise my 14 yr old little sister. I moved here at the request of the family to care for grandma, nobody wants to send her to a rest home of course! For the past 2 years or so the family has been able to give me a small monthly stipend along with the room and board of being at my grandmothers. But this past year everyone in the family is hurting financially. Grandma has racked up some impressive credit bills and the APR’s have shot through the roof and she cant make her utility payments and the credit bills..and the amount the family has been able to afford has dropped significantly. So near the first of the year I started putting in applications for P/T work. I was applying for office jobs, even just filing. For the past 3 months I’ve started applying at fast food places, even McDonalds. I’ve gotten 1 call back. Nobody is hiring and the places that do need help, I’m not qualified for. So, Mechanical Turk to the rescue! It wasn’t long after the first of the year that I heard of mturk and since then I’m working every night for at least 6 hours. It isn’t the biggest of earnings of course, but it has enabled me to keep the electricity and the telephone paid for! I don’t know what I’d do without mturk right now!

Working on Mechanical Turk has been very beneficial. I’ve been a stay-at-home wife and mom for a long time. I have a B.A. in Creative Writing, earned in 1982. I worked full-time as a secretary/writer/editor and did freelance proofreading and editing. I quit when I had my first baby and never went back to work outside of the home again on a regular basis. We’ve never had much extra money but were willing to make sacrifices so that I could stay at home and take care of our three kids. This is the lifestyle we chose. College educations for our three kids are paid mostly by scholarships and loans, which we may need to pay off the rest of our lives. My two oldest have graduated from college and married. My youngest is halfway through college. Since my kids were gone, I prayed I could find a paying job working on the computer at home and spent a lot of time researching online. Because there was (and is) such a large number of scams out there, it was discouraging. Then I discovered Mechanical Turk from a forum. To date, I’ve earned $1,776.38 since September 16th of 2008. Yes, I’m counting the pennies. To cheer on all you turkers out there, keep it up! You’ll learn to be more efficient as you do your hits and earn more and more. I can use my writing skills and help with finances. My next goal is paying for my daughter’s summer online class.

Three years ago I read an article in The Economist about Mechanical Turk in my apartment in France. I was quite curious as to what this was all about and the morning of 24 June 2006 at breakfast I made my first penny. I am not sure if this was the start of a new life as my son was born the following day, but I am still doing HITs. Almost three years and $366.62 richer, I am not sure what it is that keeps me going. I certainly do not count in any way on this income although I have used the cash to pay for many useless purchases on Amazon.com. It is not a large sum, but nothing to spit at either. At the start I enjoyed particularly working the HITS that required some thinking, or posed an intellectual challenge. The increasingly blatant commercial nature of the HITS has taken a lot of the earlier pleasure that I was obtained from this exercise, but I still keep going. I suspect that it is boredom in that keeps me at it. I measure the boredom at work by the number of HITS that I accomplish: to a certain extent the greater the number the greater the boredom. I may also be trying for a world record for having turked in the largest number of countries. To date I can count France, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Denmark, USA, Senegal, Niger, Liberia, Ghana, Gabon, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Chad and Cameroon. How do I measure the competition?

I have sung into the phone, for an art student who was compiling anonymous voices. The requester had an 800 number, and the hardest part of the hit was getting past the switchboard operator at her school, who kept telling me the place was plainly closed for the weekend. I chose to sing Sisters of Mercy onto her tape, and I have no idea if I made the cut, or how the cut was made. I got a lot, maybe 50 cents. I have clicked to grow a garden of responsive flowers, and spent far longer doing that than I should have, really a beautiful thing. I do not remember what he paid. It’s quite a sight, his electronic garden. I like writing. I have rewritten numberless squibs for guys who were, I guess, evading plagiarism. I have written quite a few astrology pieces, and quite a few mortgage pieces. The mortgage guys all seem to be morally challenged, but hey, I wrote for them. I do not like surfing for anyone at all, its too buggy and it’s much much too slow. I also hate happening on porn and on loud noises. Requesters are supposed to warn us about such things but sometimes do not. There are people here who will pay you to write questions, and others who will pay for answers, which appeals to my sense of order. I love surveys, I must admit, especially the ones that work like games. Doing surveys that take the form of games, I often feel as if I am being paid to play. But then I often feel I am being paid to play whatever I do here, just not enough.

After the economic meltdown that occurred in the autumn of 2008, my father was forced to close the doors of his business and we joined the long list of casualties that had suffered from the greed, stupidity and short-sightedness of both Republicans, Democrats and everyone else that works in the nation’s capital. I wanted to help out my parents until we could weather this economic storm, so in addition to my job, I started searching for opportunities to earn money across the great world wide web. That search led me to many destinations, one of which being here. As a mechanical turk, I perform menial and sometimes not so menial tasks, but no matter what the task, I can still take pride in my work at the end of the day because I know that the money, even if the amount is not so staggering, will add up and make a positive impact in my family’s life. That is what is most important. Whatever money I make goes towards the family’s well-being and happiness. While the work is sometimes monotonous, I still can feel good about it because of what the results will mean. I have been working as a mechanical turk now for for approximately four and a half months and as of this writing I have completed over 2,000 hits and made nearly $200. I intend on completing many more hits and making hundreds of dollars more before this year is over. Between my work as a mechanical turker, my other online jobs, and my physical job, the money that I am taking in is sure to help tide us over until a brighter future arrives. Even then, I might just continue my work as a mechanical turk because a little extra cash here and there certainly never hurts!

My Name is Amanda and I am a stay at home mom. I have been searching for a way to earn money at home but you cannot find a legitimate company that would allow you to do such a thing. I spent weeks searching, months even and I finally came across mechanical turk. I don’t make a ton of money here, but it is enough and it is legitimate. I really needed this and I want to shake hands with the person responsible for this program. I spent the majrity of my life bouncing from boyfriend to boyfriend and NEVER spent time working on my education. I finally met an incredible man, he has taken care of me and shown me that I am a very useful member of the human race. I know that I work hard at home with my two children but I really want to help my husband out financially as well. He tells me that it is not nesecary, but I feel it is. There is a rewarding feeling you get when you can take care of your families domestic needs as well as add some money to the finacial needs as well. I can buy my kids things we would not otherwise buy, like a dvd player for our car, which by the way, I am very proud of. I can add extra money each month to thier college funds and whatever else they may need in the future. Not only am I a house wife and mother, I also go to school full time, most of the classes are online, but it is just another example of how my husband enriched my life, and now that I am working mechanical turk) I am able to help out with the cost of books or supplies. Again, I don’t make very much money here, but it is enough to make me feel valuable in the financial situatuin at home. Thank you Amazon!

I’m in the midst of uncertainty with my job and my life, for that matter. I was with a major bank for 5+ years and then suddenly, they decided to off-shore and there went my job a year ago. So, I hit the streets, go a comparable job making $40,000 a year with a finance company and only 3 months later, they fired the president and his CFO girlfriend and started consolidating offices. There went that job. So…now, I’m working in a call center for cell phone tech support through a temp agency, having been here for 9mos making the same $13 an hour. I’M NOT COMPLAINING! I could be happy here and am more than willing to put my all into making this a career move from the ground-up, but the company hasn’t decided it will hire me on permanently. I was only required to work 90 days to be eligible and while my performance is quite good, if they don’t hire me in the next 90 days or so, I’m going to be without a job again because regulations of some sort don’t allow a temp to work for more than one year on a job. I would have to wait 60 days to actually re-apply and be re-hired by the temp agency - something I cannot afford to let happen. In the midst of all of that, I got married, found out he’s a controlling, internet-cheating jerk & he’s now filed for divorce – get this – for my sake so that, according to him, hopefully, I can seek the “help I need” and one day will see my way clear to come back to him. No, it doesn’t make sense, but it’s forced me to retain a lawyer and come up with the $1000 retainer just to figure out how to settle the only joint things we have – debt. Oh, did I mention we work at the same place, too? Yeah…life’s quite strange sometimes. So, like many others whose lives have been turned upside down for one of a million reasons in the last year or so, I started considering what I could do for some extra cash even if it’s just enough to pay for the gas it takes to keep me commuting the hour and a half to work one way. I looked at all the “survey” and “referrals” and “GPT” (Get Paid To…) sites and the “work-from-home” garbage, but finally found MTurk! It keeps me busy in my days off so I don’t stay so focused on the bad crap I can do nothing to control, gives me some outlets for a little writing, a little research, or whatever task and while I don’t make but pennies a HIT, it adds up – it really does! I like the feel of this site and so far I’m convinced it’s legit, so I’m encouraged that there is something I can do in the here and now, regardless of the events of the next 3 months. Keep ‘em coming! Thanks all!

I am a very lonely person. I graduated a year early from high school and moved away to college. It was really difficult for me to make friends. In high school I had many and was a very loud kid. Now I find myself by myself, overwhelmed by all the work I have to do and living with 3 other people that annoy the hell out of me. I feel extremely out of place. Work isn’t any better for me. I work for a DME company showing patients how to use various medical products. I drive around all day meeting older people who can barely move. It also doesn’t help that the main patients are located deep into the inner-city ghettos. I want to quit my job and school and just go home, the only thing stopping me is the fear that I would disappoint my parents. What is worse is that I got in trouble with the law back in October. I was caught shoplifting and was taken to jail overnight. The only thing I could think about is the disappointment in my parents faces when they find out what I had done. Now I am stuck with credit card debt to pay off the bills for the bail, the lawyer, court costs, and school loans. I just hope something changes very soon, I do not know how much I can take. I try to make the best of things but it just seems like things keep getting worse.

A month ago, I had a job that was not great, but it paid the bills. It all changed one morning when the phone rang, waking me up from a deep sleep. A coworker of mine was on the phone. He said, “I’m at work, the doors are locked and the business is permanently closed. We don’t have a job anymore.” I was unprepared and shocked. We had no warning. In the last month, I have applied for over 50 jobs, and have yet to receive an interview. With bills piling up, I was beginning to panic. I had no severance pay, and my boss disappeared without giving me my last paycheck. I’m getting unemployment, but if you’ve ever had to live on it, you know it isn’t enough to get by on. While chatting on a message board, someone mentioned Mturk to me. I signed up, and within a few days, I had typed enough to pay my electric bill. It’s not a perfect solution to my situation by any means, but it is something I can do while I sit and wait for a response to my job applications. Instead of sitting here feeling like an unemployed loser, I can at least earn a few cents and pass time. I’ve worked almost nonstop since I was fourteen and it seemed strange to be idle. At least I feel like I’m working even if it isn’t quite as lucrative as my prior jobs. As the economy continues to flounder and unemployment rates continue to drop, I predict that more people will become turkers.