Wow, really... 8pm to 2am. How can?..you seem to be very fast completing hits. How many hits do u usually complete on average per day? And how much do you get on average day?...I have been turking for nearly 3weeks now and I barely make up to 40dollars per week
Hey, sorry for the delay. I took about a week off of the forum.
I'm actually not particularly fast. I find that I take too much time READING stuff like instructions and questions for fear of getting burned by missing something important! I got my hit count up VERY quickly by a few runs of quick and easy stuff that mostly came up in the wee hours of the morning. I did a few hundred 2-3 cent receipt transcriptions. When I did them, I did only the ones that said "1-2 items" or "small receipts", and I'd either preview them and not accept the ones that had too many items or complexity, or I'd auto-accept them... and return the ones that didn't look "easy". Yes, I was cherry-picking! My goal was simply to get that 1,000 mark. Another one that I did a lot of that actually paid well, and I could do one every 90 seconds or so, was one of Noah Turk's reviewing for "unsafe" text. Haven't seen one of those in a while, but I did several hundred of those... sitting on the couch half-way watching TV. Oh, and a did a couple hours of quick "is this image NSFW" hits one night at around 4am. I've never seen that HIT come up again, either.
Since I hit 1,000, two things have happened. First, I swear things have slowed down. Most of last week was okay, but the week before was crappy. This weekend since Friday afternoon has been crappy. I think a lot of it is just more people (like myself) are discovering MTurk out of necessity. It's going to make it harder to find and get the good work.
BTW, I'm almost at 1500 approved HITs and I've had exactly 3 rejections. One I got reversed because it was BS, and I called them on it politely. (they rejected it because something in their process didn't go through, wasn't MY fault) So, I have 2 rejects, 99.86%.
The other thing is that I've been experimenting with my methods. I started out using MTS Hit Finder and Catcher. It's easy to use once you figure it out, and gets the job done. But, I hoped that Panda Crazy would be better and faster. So, I tried PC with Hit Forker. Not as easy to use as MTS, and seemed to have about the same results. I found that of the two, I kinda like MTS better.
Then I stumbled across an Android app (Turkdroid) that also has a finder and catcher. It does NOT have a lot of bells and whistles, just the basics. But, I find that I like it as a tool for finding work. I do 98% of my work on my laptop still, I just like having the finder and catcher loops running OFF of my laptop. Keeps that process from slowing anything else down. I also REALLY like the speed with which I can scroll through HITs and either Panda or Accept them with one finger. It's all the same stuff I was doing on the laptop, but I don't have to track the mouse pointer from one side of the screen to the other and flip between tabs and windows and find buttons to click and such. It's all right there on a 3" wide screen at my fingertip. Very cool.
So, while I did manage a few $50 days, and one $70 day, my average has been more like $20-30 per day. My current goal is just to try to hit $25 if it's not a crappy day. I'm not stressing about it too much. I'm taking pay every 7 days, and if that's in the ballpark of $250/pop, I'm happy.
How many hits? Unless I'm hustling through some bulk work, it's usually about 2 hits per $1 on average. I do my share of $1-3 hits, and occasionally a $5-6 hit or so. But, I do a bunch of little 30-50 cent work to balance it out. Still, I'm typically doing less than 40-50 hits per day. Even my $50 days have been significantly less than 100 hits. I'm not making my money on "bulk work". (as noted, I'm not that fast!)
Current method is to use the phone app and filter the "finder" for >$1.05 and Panda (usually a Once) anything that looks interesting to me. I try not to have more than 5-6 items active in the "catcher", so I'll delete items out of there often, keeping the freshest and best paying (or most intersting) stuff in there. Once I've done that, I flip to the main "all hits" list, which is filtered for >$0.35. I ignore anything more than $1.00 because I've already seen it in the Finder. There, I don't even Panda anything, I just click accept if it doesn't look horrible. It either gets dumped into my queue, or it's not available. Don't care. Click it and move to the next one.
If any of the above was successful, I'll have at least 6-8 items in my queue! I hop onto the laptop to work for a half hour or so. Make a few bucks. And if I'm on my game, I'll flip back to the phone app before the queue is empty and scan things to try to get some more work in there.
I'm FAR from 100% efficient, but doing it this way does keep me a little busier with some fill-in 35-90 cent hits that I'd been skipping before. They don't pay much, and sometimes they're not even "worth it", but when I look at "sitting here doing nothing and making NOTHING vs making a little bit for something that doesn't make me think"... okay, I'll do it.
My final desperation move that usually kicks in after midnight is to look at hits all the way down to a penny. Look for workable batches that will either pay something, or at least "safely" get some numbers. Look for qualification hits. Whatever looks right. Lately, it's all been crap.
As a lot of people have said, you have to find what works for you. How much effort do you want to put in? How much time do you have to kill? How much money do you NEED to make? I'm in the "I'm not gonna kill myself trying to make $50 every day" camp. When the economy returns to normal, I make $50 for doing a 90-minute driving lesson! I was happy doing 6-9 lessons per week over the course of 3 days/week. It would be "nice" to replace all of that income, but I'm not gonna bust my ass doing it because I don't need to. Ultimately, I'm just doing MTurk to have something to do and have a LITTLE bit of money coming in.
As I refine my technique, I'll figure out more what times of day are "best" to work, and I'll just ignore MTurk the rest of the time. I can probably get my "Turking time" down to 4-5 hours per day and still make $25-30/day. Maybe more on a good day.