Associated Content, by contrast, reviews submissions in house and then decides how much to pay for them. The site, which specializes in how-to pieces and feature stories on news topics, had 237,000 registered contributors and more than one million content pieces as of February, both about double from the same month a year ago.
After posting the content, the site sells advertisements against it and distributes it to other companies, such as online shoe retailer Zappos, which use the content on their own Web sites. If Associated Content accepts a submission (it says it rejects about 25% of them), the author gets between $5 and $30, plus $1.50 for each 1,000 page views. An ability to write “search-engine-optimized” content, an industry term for generating good Google results, helps, says site founder Luke Beatty.
People are not only looking for payment but also establishing their credentials “as somebody with experience”, he says. Writing about a specific profession, such as law or real estate, helps raise a person’s profile online, enhancing his job searches, says Mr. Beatty.
Sabah Karimi, a 26-year-old from Orlando, Fla., left a career in marketing to become a full-time freelance writer and now spends between 8 and 10 hours a week writing for Associated Content. She has been at it for about three years and says she earns roughly $1,000 a month from her past and current submissions.
Ms. Karimi cautions newcomers to Associated Content that it takes time to build up earnings. She says she learned how to write articles that would bring traffic and often looks for newsy ideas that will attract readers.
Mechanical Turk, by contrast, is based on “crowd sourcing”, or breaking a task into lots of tiny pieces and giving it to a big group of people to complete quickly. Most of these jobs — which the site calls HITs, for human intelligence tasks — pay just a few cents. Efficient MTurkers, as they call themselves, can make more than $100 a week doing things such as finding someone’s email address or labeling images of a particular animal in a photograph.
Amazon says that MTurk now has 200,000 workers from 100 different countries, but it doesn’t keep track of past figures.
The site — named for an 18th-century stunt involving a turbaned chess-playing “machine” with an actual chess master hidden within — began as a way to help Amazon manage its product database, says Sharon Chiarella, vice president of Amazon Mechanical Turk. Amazon uses the site to help sort images and content, paying people a few cents a task. Mechanical Turk also serves a variety of companies who need Web tasks performed, especially those that require a human element. Test-prep startup Knewton Inc., for example, uses it extensively for focus-group-type tasks, as well as enlisting people to take its practice tests.
Keri Knutson, a mother of five from Independence, La., discovered Mechanical Turk when her eldest son was headed for college. Ms. Knutson, now 45, needed money for his tuition and fees. She took on all kinds of low-paying but easy tasks at the beginning, from finding a place to purchase a specific item to identifying the name of a street in a photograph. |
