January Update

At the end of December while I was flush with ideas about how to generate some cash and independence, I promised to write an update at the end of January as to how it was all going. 

I had a crack at doing some work on Mechanical Turk.  It's a bit of a black art finding something that you can do quickly that generates enough cash to at least nudge you over the minimum wage level, but I found a task where you had to write 150 words on a random set of topics; this paid the princely sum of $1, and without any interruptions I could write about 10 an hour.  That's c. £6.50, at the current exchange rate. The good thing about this was that I could sit and write for an hour and then, if I found myself near a computer later on in the day, I could write a few more whilst doing other things (waiting for the kettle to boil, or the kids' tea to be cooked etc). 

Luckily for me, I only did this for a few days.  Otherwise I'd be even more pissed off than I am.  Because, despite saying in their FAQ that you can transfer your earnings to your bank account, once you actually attempt to do this you discover that if you're a UK resident, you can only be paid in Amazon.com gift tokens.  And not even ones you can use somewhere useful like Amazon.co.uk.  I had a brief look at shipping rates on the .com site and they were around the $40 mark; so I'd have to go back to Mechanical Turk and work for another two or three days to earn enough to pay for the shipping on anything I spent my earnings on.  I read somewhere that after the US and India, the UK has the most MT workers - but why, if you can't do anything useful with what you earn?

Anyway, that was a giant pile of poo and a waste of my time.  But I've found some more crowd-sourcing sites that do pay you in real live money, probably because they're not part of some big shopping empire.  So I registered with one (Clickworker.com) and did two of their basic assessment tests - a grammar one (quite long, not particularly easy) and an author one.   The fact that these tests were considerably more rigorous than anything I'd had to do on MT was quite encouraging; I thought the work available might be more of a challenge and better paid.  And then I got the results back from my basic assessment tests - grammar test passed, author test failed due to plagiarism.

God, I was indignant!  I'd had to write a 120 word review of a film, so I wrote one on Rise of the Planet of the Apes which we'd watched the night before.  I'm assuming that they use plagiarism checking software which is, apparently, rubbish, so the fact that I used the film title, phrases like "motion capture" and name-checked a couple of the actors and characters meant that about a third of my 120 words were the same as in any review of said film.  I wrote a vitriolic email to the company pointing out that I have a degree in English and am perfectly capable of writing 120 words on a given topic without having to resort to nicking it off the internet.  But then I deleted it before I sent it and felt much more grown up for having done so.  Doug says that I should write to them nicely and ask them to reconsider, but it's probably easier just to re-register using a different email address and do the tests again.

Because of that, I haven't actually discovered whether the work that Clickworker.com offers is worth my time.  Nor have I got round to investigating the other crowdsourcing sites, although I'm planning to do that this week.  I have, however, found some audio typing agencies that welcome CVs from people who want to work from home, but I'm still reluctant to send off my CV just yet; I've been practicing, but I'm not 100% sure I want to take a typing test just yet.  However, I am drawing up a list of things that would need to be included on an audio typing services website, and then Doug is going to help me produce a little brochurewear site that I can use to offer my services independently of any bureau.  No idea if that will work, but nothing ventured etc.

My conclusions from the month of January are as follows:  it seems to be a lot more difficult than perhaps it should be to earn random bits of money from the internet.  It may be that I need to work at it (and I'll carry on for a bit) but it's been a frustrating experience so far - I just wonder if I'm going to do it for a period of time and then come to conclusion that if you want to earn money, you have to get a proper job.