I’m new to this forum. I have been working on Mturk for almost a year now. I have completed about 9000 hits with 98.3% approval. I still don’t get many hits, with mostly are from $0.01 to $0.03. I have installed MTS, Panda Crazy, Scraper, and Mturk Master. I still don’t get many jobs. Am I doing something wrong? Can anyone please help me?
This is a difficult question to answer without seeing the specifics of your work set-up. It could be your internet is too slow. It could be that you are generating too many page request errors. It could be that a lot of the things you want to work on require a 99+ approval rating, or more HITs completed. It could be that you're just bogging down your browser with so many scripts that it just can't catch HITs quickly enough. Maybe you even have your thresholds set to only accept a small sliver of the available HITs. I know that's not super helpful, but it's a vague answer in response to the vague question you posed. Try following the daily thread to see HITs as they're posted in real time. Also, try not too PANDA too much at a time. Happy hunting.
Could be also the type of hits you're accepting. If you're only looking for batches, I've no information about that as I don't do batches. I've been turking since 2011/2012 and I used to do batches, but not anymore. I know they can help you bring in great amounts of $$ provided you can catch good ones. I stick with surveys, although that's give and take on whether there are excellent/good paying ones you qualify for. Some days there's just not much posted with high $$ amounts that I qualify for that I can take. I agree with Alexandra in VT, that what I've said may not be the only reason and it is true, that without having any knowledge of your work set-up, it's hard to pin-point what exactly could be done to increase your incoming flow of hits. If it is just the internet, you could see how fast/slow it is yourself and there are some things you can do to speed up your laptop//desktop (cleaning your cache, etc., running malwarebytes) that may clear some things up. If you find your internet is running slow and it's feasible for you and an option, you could change internet providers. Sometimes, though, that's just not an option for many people.
The first thing that stands out to me is your approval rating, I would work on getting it up to over 99% as soon as possible. One thing that will affect what you see is your demographics, gender, age, school, work, kids, income, etc... I assume you've already filled out all the mechanical turk demographic HITs in the year you've been turking, but if anything has changed, then updating them might help. Set your search criteria to see as many HITs as possible, by that I mean performing a search for any HITs above 1 cent, that you qualify for, viewing them by newest first. Check what you've set your FINDER settings to scrape for or if you're using other scripts make sure your settings are not restricting what you see when you scrape for new HITS. Also perform searches for qualification HITs every chance you get (search for HITs worth 0 and above you can do and if they're Qual HITs, do them, EVERY CHANCE YOU GET). Another thing I would look at is what HITs you're blocking...Have you by chance been blocking HITs by requester name rather than by HIT ID? I'd take a look at your Blocklist and see if there are any requesters that shouldn't be on that list (and start blocking HITs by group ID or HIT ID rather than HIT name or requester name unless you actually do want to block the requester). You don't want to block HITs that have a very common title such as "5 minute survey" or "Research Survey" since these tend to be used often by new requesters and you might be blocking HITs you haven't done yet. I can't think of anything else to suggest at the moment but I hope this helps. Do let us know if things improve for you.
That is very unusual. Just topped 9,000 a few days ago, and I've only been Turking for 2.5 months, and only part-time. Here's a few ideas I didn't see mentioned: 1.) Are you a US worker? US workers see a much greater variety of hits, from what I can tell. 2.) Are you fast and skilled with computers? You can have lots of add-ons, but if you type slowly and click slowly, you'll lose HITs to people who can work faster. Here's a few practical suggestions: 1.) Look into getting Turkernator. It costs $10/mo, but it makes Turking substantially easier. What I like is how new HITs are placed at the top of the search, unlike the other scrapers I've used where it's a seemingly random jumble of work. You can also set it just below your browser window so you can catch HITs while you work. Just caught a $2.50 survey while typing this. 2.) If you miss a nice-paying survey, check the time allotted, set a timer to end a few minutes before, and start a PANDA when the timer ends. Often, people will vacuum up HITs and not work on them all, so they drop back into the system once the time allotted expires. If you have a PANDA going, you'll catch them as soon as they come in. Great for busy times of the day, doesn't work so well in the evenings.
Check QualifEye and look for new work every day on mturk. Today I had two jobs I qualified on 2 weeks ago. At this moment using only MTS - I'll add every new qualification to my include list with the strict matching box uncheck. I like batches. Also, I'll pick up survey HITS from the work that show in the title the word survey because that's a keyword I use in my include list (strict matching box uncheck). P.S. I'm not fast.
