No, we’re not talking about those creepy, spam-like ads about making seven thousand dollars online in two days. We’re talking bonafide, tried-and-tested ways in which people are cashing in on the power of the internet. We looked into four different ways you can use your skills to make money, from writing product reviews to submitting stock photos to selling clothes online, and found out what it takes, how long it takes and whether or not we should consider quitting our day jobs.

Mechanical Turk

Launched in 2007 by online retailer Amazon.com, Mechanical Turk (mturk.com) is an online employment marketplace. The idea is that anyone can post a job, for whatever pay, and users can choose to accept these jobs. Typical tasks might include interview transcriptions, product reviews, and random online research tasks—odd time-consuming jobs that can’t be automated by computers, yet. You can accept cash or use your earnings to buy something on the Amazon website. Could I have finally found a way to make a living waking up at noon and working in my underwear while snacking on a bowl of sugary cereal? Here is my blow-by-blow account of a day not at the office.

9:30am-10am

Net gain: US$0.10 (B3.20)
I sign up at 9:30am. You can choose to be an employer and put tasks online, or a worker and take Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs. In a couple of clicks, I’m a bonafide “Turker.”
Navigation is confusing at first. Many HITs only pay about two cents (60 satang). These menial tasks involved cutting and pasting links to the answer fields and thinking up a technical question for new products.
Lesson learned: Though this type of easy, brainless work demanded very little from me intellectually (great when you’re hungover), after a half hour I figured out that doing these tasks are just not worth the time they take.

10am-10:30am

Net gain: US$2.50 (B75)
Time to up the ante. For US$2.50 (B75), I find a HIT that involves writing a five-part interactive short story. It takes me another half-hour because the task also involves searching for images to go with the stories online.
Lesson learned: If you can write well in English, this task actually paid B150/hour, which would equate to a B26,000 monthly salary for 8 hours a day, five days a week. Not bad and kind of fun.

10:30am-11:30am

Net gain: US$8 (approx. B240)
I’m not going to get rich any time soon at this rate, so I start going for HITs that pay a little more. There were some bigger money tasks that paid US$10-US$20 but those required you to take some qualification tests. I was looking for a quick fix so I skipped those. The ones that were available to me paid up to US$4 and were mostly product reviews and PR writing. I did a product review on an investment book and thought of a technical question for android phones. It actually felt like real work.
Lesson learned: If you can keep this up, you could make B42,240 a month! It’s really, really boring and monotonous, though. Also, the HITs fluctuate and there’s no way to guarantee what sort of jobs are available. Finally, one job was actually rejected a day later, because I had reviewed the wrong type of book—my real net gain here is actually only B120.

11:30am-12pm

Net gain: 0 baht.
I’m getting bored with reviews when I find a task that pays US$6 to identify portraits, but I need to take a qualification quiz first. The problem is all the links are broken—there’s no such thing as easy money.
I’m going through all the posted HITs but not finding anything worthwhile. There are a couple of HITs in the higher paying brackets but you have to take into account how long these tasks would take to complete. Some employers pay B150 to transcribe a 50-minute interview, including editing and cleaning up, which could actually take up to an hour and a half (that’s about B50 an hour).
Lesson learned: Sometimes you have to be picky and be patient. If you don’t see a worthwhile HIT, just keep pushing the refresh button and hope a good one will pop up.

12pm-1:30pm

Net gain: US$8 (B240).
I try another qualification quiz for a company called SpeechInk. They ask you to transcribe small interviews but you need to pass a test first. They ask you to transcribe various 2-minute interviews using their assigned style, and agree to terms of confidentiality. This takes me about a half-hour.
Passing this test opened up a whole new set of simple jobs that pay ok: two-minute interviews pay around US$2 (B60), up to US$20 (B600) for 45-minute interviews. They also give out occasional bonuses. The downside is when you listen to the interviews, a lot of them are inaudible and sometimes in different languages. I manage to bank four.
Lesson Learned: If I really wanted to spend eight hours a day transcribing 3-minute insurance interviews, I could make money out of this. But then again, I’d probably shoot myself by day two.

1:30pm

I take lunch. I flip on some Channel V and fill my bowl of cereal. With no boss around it’s really difficult to find the motivation to keep doing these mindless tasks, so I give myself the afternoon off. Good job, Clae. You rock.

The Verdict

All in all, Mechanical Turk feels like a job. It’s also addictive in the way that your grandma gets addicted to the lottery. You might be able to make a living through it if you were strict with yourself, but with that sort of effort, you might as well just go find a normal job and keep the dollars that you make to buy books on Amazon.
Total gain: In four hours, I made B140 an hour, which could mean 24,640 a month, if I stuck to eight hour days. The other issue is that your tasks have to be cleared by your virtual employers, so while I made B560 in 4 hours, only B170 worth of tasks were accepted and the rest were still pending after two days. Clae Sea

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Online Seller: Can’t write, can’t take pictures? Be an online seller.
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