Occasionally I’ve run across sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk or CoinWorker.com. These sites provide simple tasks that can be done online for a nominal fee.
I just tried CoinWorker out of curiosity. I performed a few simple tasks and was paid the grand total of one point, which took me ten minutes to earn, and was worth the equivalent of… one US cent. That’s a grand total of six cents per hour.
I looked at Mechanical Turk a while back and they paid similar rates. My question: where are these rates competitive? Who is doing these tasks? If expert workers manage to be, say, five times faster, and make 30c/h, where is that comparable to regular wages? These tasks need an active Internet connection, so the worker needs to pay for that as well.
The workers can all be college students doing it for the lulz. Are there slave factories doing these tasks somewhere?
I have posted jobs on microworkers, the people doing the work are in what it is called “third world countries” or developing countries. The IPs are very diverse geographically like Haiti, Venezuela, Philippines, India, Nigeria, Bangladesh. I’ve never seen an IP from the USA or Europe even, so the work is being done in areas where the cost of living is lower.
ISTM there was a thread a while ago in which Dopers discussed their experiences with Amazon Mechanical Turk. The gist of the thread seemed to be: There are some better-paying tasks there (still not much better-paying), but you have to work your way up to them. Do a bunch of those penny-a-task jobs and rack up a good track record, and little by little you can move up to the better jobs.
I got the sense that people (at least those who are intelligent enough to be discussing it on the Dope, as opposed to those starving third-worlders) were typically doing it just for their own entertainment.
ETA: Here are links to two threads, both from 2009:
I haven’t used Mechanical Turk for years - but back when I did, you could sometimes from large batches of tasks that could be performed at a glance - i.e. “does this picture contain a book?” - it was possible to burn through these at about 3 or 4 seconds per task - especially if you restricted yourself to clicking ‘yes’ for the obvious ones, and ‘skip’ for all the rest.
Suppose you had, say, a retired guy with nothing left to do in life but spend all day and all night on the Straight Dope Message Board. If such a person spent some substantial part of that time doing AMT instead, could he earn enough to bother with? (Assume that this person is going to be paying for his ISP service and internet connection anyway.)
I do it - it sucks up time and gives me something to do, I can frequently do a lot of the little ones mentioned in an hour, I do get to do some of the bigger ones [skip the $20 one that seems to be a scam to get banking info for some sort of identity fraud] and over the course of the year I make enough to get my brother the 2 100 count packages of DVD/rs he likes for Christmas, and occasional ebooks for myself. I also do survey sites and my roomie is on some site that sends products out for us to evaluate. We got to be a test family for some brand of coffee creamer with christmas flavors. [I can’t see peppermint in my coffee, but I could see it for enriching eggnog or cocoa.] I also have been on the guinea pig panel for Con-Agra, JAc-Pak [they do meats] and a dairy [blech, some of the nonfat coffee cream that they were trying to make from regular skim milk were nasty.]