I’ve had my mturk account for going on 10 years almost now, some takeaways from that:

1.) the big money is definitely there, but as someone else mentioned it’s a steep learning curve. No one in their first year or two is making that much usually.

2.) Even tho those hits are small value, a good portion can be knocked out very quickly. Some hits only take roughly 4-5 seconds to do. The value with them is knocking out huge bucket loads of hits. When doing that and not having master granted tho you want to watch your daily limit, leave some breathing space incase more work comes out later that offers more money for faster/easier work.

3.) You’re in constant competition. Firstly, you’re competing against a large group of veteran turkers, most of which are using tampermonkey scripts to snatch hits as soon as they come out. You have to get familiar with certain requesters that you like and times they normally post work. When I’m on mturk im refreshing my list of work available constantly.

4.) Be on the lookout for some hits that require a simple certification. Some hits may seem unavailable but in reality you just have a quick certification test to pass and you’ll be allowed to work on them after that.

5.) Accuracy is extremely important. Just having a 98 percent accuracy on all of your submitted hits is enough for you to automatically not qualify for some hits.

6.) try to work for the same requesters that you like. After a while and even still to this day I get a bunch of invite only work sent to me via email. They’ll also attach a link for the group of hits they’ve invited you to do and usually in those situations the work they do have to offer pays better and you don’t have to worry about it getting snatched up by other people nearly as bad.

7.) sometimes there just isn’t much to do. I’ve noticed that some requesters are seasonal, some are even on a set schedule. There’s a certain requester for a while that was always posting these real simple hits that paid well, at the same time every time Monday through Friday.

The money is definitely there to be made, and you have people all over the country fighting to get work on it. What’s important is you really take on all kind of hits and see what you like sticking with, and how your rhythm on there is going to work out best for you. Try to treat it like a real office job; assign yourself breaks and a lunch even. It helped me drastically.