It all started about 15 months ago, when I stumbled across the mTurk concept by accident. I was immediately sucked in and since then I made about $4,000 in my spare time. A little background about myself: I’m a researcher in computer science and I live in Italy. Here we are not paid as much as in the USA and since I buy anyway a lot of English books from Amazon I decided to try it. There are some things that I like about mTurk (and quite a lot that I don’t). I like to be able to make some cents by clicking on my laptop while I’m watching television or while I’m watching on the laptop itself an old episode of X-files. I don’t like the fact that we, the workers, have so little power and many requesters (like the Askville team) have no respect for us. The requesters who actually have an interaction with us (on the semi-official turker’s forum) are just few. Another thing I really do not like is that only people from USA and India can be paid with money. The others can only use the rewards to buy items from Amazon. Well, I would buy anyway items from Amazon most of the times, but I really would like to be able to transfer the money to my account on the Amazon UK site, since the shipping rates from USA to Europe (plus the tax that I have to pay on most of the goods coming from outside Europo) are really killing the fun for me. Often I buy an used book for less than $1 and I have to pay more than $12 in shipping. In practice the only items I can buy, apart books, are videogames and small electronic items (but only few of them). Anyway, sometimes I appreciate the fact that I have to buy Amazon items: I’m usually a parsimonious guy, so I usually refrain from buying costly books. The fact that I cannot convert my rewards in real money gives me an alibi and make me more relaxed in seconding my book-a-holic attitudes. I sometimes feel a little guilty using mTurk, thinking that I’m taking away work from people who really deserve it. But my rate of work is quite sloppy, most of the time. Indeed, for a couple of months I used all my spare time to work on mTurk, but then I put a stop on it, since it was becoming a sort of drug: I liked to see the cents and bucks piling up in my account, but I had no more spare time to read books, which was the original cause of my working ! :)