so for the last 30 days i've been using amazon mechanical turk as a side hustle spending one to two hours every single day to see if mturk can actually be a good working from home side hustle well if you're interested in finding out how much money i actually ended up making because it was more than i expected then make sure to stay tuned and watch until the end hey guys my name is chris and welcome back to the lifestyle design show the number one place for young adults to learn about personal finance and entrepreneurship you may recall that about eight to ten months ago i made another amazon mechanical turk video where i tried using it for about two hours to see how much i could actually make in that two hour time span well here's the thing in that video i only made about 50 cents but i heard a lot of people in the comments were saying things about i didn't give it a fair shot and so i really thought about that i wanted to see if this could actually be a possible side hustle for people looking for something that they could do from home especially right now there's so many people that are at home looking for a way to make extra income so all through may i devoted myself to this mturk challenge i wanted to make it a real side hustle not just a couple hours on a random sunday morning i wanted to actually see if i spent 12 to 14 hours per week or about 45 hours in the entire month how much money i could actually make if you're not sure what amazon mechanical turk is well it's basically a crowdsourcing platform where different requesters can hire you essentially for information or odd jobs that they can't get a computer to do these jobs are called hits human intelligence tasks mostly they're going to be surveys or odd jobs like outlining things or completing sentences or even using your voice to do like voiceovers the options are really limitless but the thing is with amazon mechanical turk is it's often called an internet sweatshop because a lot of the jobs that you do are so low paying so like the last video i did i spent two hours and i really only made a few cents i couldn't make more from looking in the couch cushions for change but i've also seen quite a few people on the youtube comments and on the amazon mechanical turk facebook group i'm in talking about the potential of this side hustle saying that you can make anywhere from an average 9 to 12 an hour and even up to 20 an hour and more so i really wanted to find out the secrets that amazon mechanical turk holds and to find out what i was doing wrong and start to make actual income through the side hustle okay okay so now i'm sure you're wondering what were the results of you doing this side hustle for 30 days so here's the breakdown and there's a few different streams of income that i'm about to mention from emter so my direct deposit payment at the end of the month was 177 which i was okay with i was like wow almost 200 in my bank account from just working on the side was pretty good the more exciting part of this is towards the end of the month i really started to get some really quality jobs and so these jobs weren't paid through emter they were actually paid through paypal and through amazon gift card so there was one specific case study i did where i signed on to a zoom call and shared some thoughts on an app and social media and this call went more than just two hours i was on the phone with these people for seven hours but at 25 an hour on a saturday morning from my bedroom i made 182 dollars and don't get me wrong it was a long day but that's more money in one hour than i've ever made before and so that blew my mind to the potential of emter so right there that's 182 plus 177 and i also completed another case study this time over the phone which was about one hour for 18 and this was paid through amazon gift card and lastly there was a lot of pending jobs that i completed in the month of may but didn't actually settle the funds until after the month was over and so all these jobs after they were accepted and i actually got paid they gave me a nice extra bonus of 22 so the total amount of money that i earned from amazon mechanical turk for the entire 30 days of may was drum roll please 399 so i'm gonna round it up to 400 that's insane that's more money than i ever thought was possible to earn from this platform if you enjoy learning about online side hustles make sure to go ahead and decimate that like button for the youtube algorithm thanks guys but the big question now that you know how much i made is how much per hour that works out to be so i would say about 45 to 50 hours of active work went into the side hustle and so let's do the math so 400 divided by about 47 hours that's about 8.50 per hour and you know what i'll take that that's basically minimum wage but a big factor there that i want to emphasize is a lot of those hours really went into me building my numbers my completed hits at the beginning i wasn't making much you know a dollar a day 50 cents a day on a good day maybe five to ten dollars it was really towards the end of this challenge that i really started to see my earnings skyrocket it was an exponential curve but it took a lot of time on the front in order to see the rewards on the back end i would say i probably spent 30 hours of active work probably made an average of two to three dollars per hour which is not good that is essentially a sweatshop and so if you're going to do mturk make sure that you understand that it takes a lot of time on the front end to really see any benefit and even after you put in the work and the time the higher paying jobs are not guaranteed but they are out there at first i was a big non-believer in online surveys because usually they're kind of scammy but after this month after earning 400 my opinion of this online space of surveys and crowdsourcing really has changed so let me know in the comments what you think about it and what your experience has been i want to address some of the comments from the last youtube video one of the main comments is how hard it is for people that are just starting with amazon mechanical turk and that's true when you first sign up for empty there actually is an official trial period for the first 10 days you can only complete 100 hits per day and then beyond that after that 10 days there really is a bit of a learning curve and that's because mturk really values people that show quality of work and that have the right characteristics for what these requesters are looking for and i'll get more into that in a second but the next comment i want to address is the fact that on the last video i was actually doing amazon mechanical turk on a sunday morning and so that is a very important factor for why i didn't make that much in the span of two hours i only made 50 cents it's because i was doing it on the weekend and there's less available jobs on the weekend because there's certain times of the day that are better for hits than others and there's certain days that are better than others and the most popular comment i was talking to the camera explaining what i was doing as i was going and many people pointed out that the fact that i was talking so much took away from my ability to complete jobs and finish the work fast with mturk it's really important to go as fast as possible these jobs are really dependent on your speed of work and the more hits that you can get done in a short amount of time the more money you make so over this month when i was doing mturk i made sure that the time i blocked out was deep focus i would make sure that i could spend an entire hour of just focusing or even if it's 30 minutes i needed to devote my entire attention to completing that here are some of the top secrets that over this month have really changed the mturk game for me so beyond anything else with mturk what's most valued is how many jobs you've completed so when you're just getting started it's really important to hit at least 100 completed hits another big milestone is to get to 500 completed hits and i've heard that once you get to a thousand completed hits then you really start to qualify for so many more jobs the reason that this is so important is because different jobs require different qualifications so i'm still working to get to that 1000. over this month that was my goal i'm at about 250 let's get to that thousands i did not get to that level because hits take a little bit longer than you might expect sometimes with classes i'm doing summer um summer a and summer b it's been a little bit hard to turk quite as much as i was before but i'm still managing to do about 10 to 20 hits per day which i've been pretty happy with it did get to about 600 completed hits and i will say that after i hit that 500 mark i did notice a lot more high paying jobs that were available to me so when you're just getting started even if you have to complete a bunch of really low paying jobs you know two cents five cents it doesn't matter because you're really working towards that number goal not a money goal find jobs that say they only take one minute or two minutes or they're very brief or quick those are going to help you get more completed hits under your belt faster and i should be at that 1000 mark in the next few months and if you're interested in seeing if my earnings actually increase after i hit that milestone just let me know in the comments if you want to see me make a follow-up video about that because i'm personally interested it's it's almost it reminds me of like a like xbox when you have like an achievement unlocked you know it's like a little achievement the second really important piece of advice is to join a forum or facebook group i joined a facebook group that i really like it's called mturk members i also like the forum on reddit called hits worth turking for but essentially having a community of other people that are doing amazon mechanical turk it's going to be much easier to find high paying turks you're also going to get really good advice and having a community behind you really just makes a huge difference when you're embarking on a side hustle like this the third piece of advice that i've been doing all month is to make sure that you qualify whenever possible so often at the end of a hit you're gonna see a little survey at the bottom that amazon provides and this survey has a lot of demographic questions and questions that are a little bit more personal because amazon's trying to get a profile for you as a worker also sometimes you're gonna see jobs at amazon posts and they're zero dollars they're not paid but often they're just really quick 30 seconds to one minute surveys that ask specific questions like are you a student are you a part-time or full-time worker things like this will add to your mturk profile and will help you to qualify for more higher paying jobs and this has been a game changer huge game changer the more you can qualify the better off you're going to be on the subject of qualifications there's something called the amazon masters and this is really elusive no one really knows much about it but a lot of the really high paying jobs require you to have an amazon master certification no one really knows how to how to earn this it's just takes a lot of time and a lot of completed jobs and eventually amazon just kind of decides that you're worth it i actually emailed amazon mechanical turk to try to find out more about this master's qualification they just basically said that they give it to you based on how much work you do and the quality of your work and kind of just gave me that brush off answer but getting a masters on amazon really is the end goal i feel like for me at least because once you get that masters you're almost guaranteed to get those higher paying jobs more frequently the fourth piece of advice make sure you're turking at ideal hours so like i said before the weekend doesn't have as many options you're not gonna find as many options during lunchtime either so the ideal turking hours are really early morning late afternoon and then sometimes at night you're gonna get some valuable ones too i've also found that in the middle of the night like three a.m to five or six am there's some pretty solid job opportunities there too so if i ever can't sleep i often would just open up my laptop and start turking which i know is probably not the best way to get yourself to sleep but there are some good hit opportunities in that early morning time and that late afternoon time the next piece of advice is to use a hit capture like mturk suite is the one i've been using and it really helps you to narrow down what hits that you want to complete what you qualify for the higher paying ones and it adds them into a list that helps you to more easily access the jobs you want to do because with mturk one of the biggest time consuming things isn't the actual work but instead it's looking for jobs that are good to complete and that are actually going to pay well and so using a hit capture really makes a big difference and then the last piece of advice really important for anyone getting started with mturk is to use keywords use the search bar on mturk use keywords like quick brief one minute two minute five minutes and even the word bonus all of these words are going to help you to narrow down which jobs you actually want to complete so this is much more efficient than just scrolling and scrolling looking for a job that you can complete using this keyword function and also making sure that you click jobs i'm qualified to work on in the filter option it's gonna help you to find jobs much quicker than you would otherwise so what does mturk rate on the side hustle scale well i'm gonna give mturk a 5.96 mturk is a great option for anyone looking for easy work that they can do online from the comfort of their own home but it's not the most lucrative it is very time consuming and in order to actually make it a good side hustle it takes a lot of time and a lot of work but if you decide that you do want to embark on this mturk life and you do want to work towards making this into a good side hustle well then welcome to the grinds