[Please Help!] Struggling to make $10 a day

So I just did the math and I'm averaging $5.92 a day. I'm making roughly $2 or less an hour doing this, but I suppose that isn't a huge deal given that I am primarily doing it during downtime at work. The only reason I'm getting close to that even is because I am using all the scripts that I've read can help and I've grabbed up a few good ones to make up for all the bad ones. I have been looking over all the websites suggesting HITs and they are nearly always requiring masters and/or 5000 HITs approved. I have made 1 attempt at batch HITs and had 15% of them rejected, see https://turkopticon.ucsd.edu/reports?id=A3L57Z14PPN2YH if you want details. Horrible requester.

Most of the HITs I can see are ones that pay so poorly that James Billings surveys have become my best option at this point. That said I have a metered data connection while at work and can't keep doing his because of all the streaming media required, it's burned through way too much of my data to be worth it.

To add insult to injury, I suppose it's made even more challenging that my downtime at work can be anywhere between the hours of 12am-6:30am eastern time. I've read that there are less HITs during the night.


In any case, I've tried every suggestion I have been able to find through many hours of reading from multiple resources and none of it appears to be helping so I figured I would ask for suggestions. Any help is appreciated.

Kinda feel like there is something important I am missing that is just out of my grasp...

 

I seem to have some that i just dont earn very well. Some of the 1 cent batches can be worth it. A9's are hits for amazon, normally sorting images. With a script and if i dont get distracted i could pull as least 30.00 from those batches. They are great for beefing up you approved hit number. I had 4k hits 3 months ago and now im creeping over to 40k.
I would also hang out in the daily thread. Lots of information can be learned on there. Also a great group of people chat with. Or in my case lurk. "shy"
Good Luck

 

It may help to know what you are doing, just saying you've tried everything and using all the scripts doesn't help us to know what you are doing. Maybe you are running multiple scripts that are conflciting or slowing down or causing to many PRE's. Let us know your setup and it would help in providing you input. Also do come check out the daily threads tons of hits are posted all day long that you can panda and try to catch.

 

There will be times good batches post during those hours for sure, but they aren't going to be consistent and tbh you'll probably need to learn JS in order to write your own scripts to survive the nights the freebies don't show up for ya. I doubt many fantastic surveys post during those hours but maybe a few? Also trying hit scraper to filter through the entire site at the start of the night to catch lingering old surveys might actually be a viable use case for the script in your situation.

Beyond that, what @TurkedOut said is true. There is a HUGE difference between using scripts and using them properly.

 

The people consistently doing $50-100 days (even $200) have closed quals bro. Some might wanna sell you the dream of "keep doing surveys and it'll happen for you" but you really need to try to get qualified for as many hits as possible. Set your filter on Mturk to "0" and uncheck "hits I'm qualified for" as a start. Now what you need to do is actively look for tests every single day. Keep doing those, passing and picking up qualifications. When your hourly starts getting to where you want it to be set your filter back to normal but not before that. You got this. Once you find a requester with a batch that you like add them to Panda Crazy because if you like them 9/10 there are other people that like them so you wanna be ahead of the pack.

 

My first 100 dollar day was more than a year after I started. My first 200 day was 19 months after I started. Its not easy.

 

No one said it would be easy. You still have to put in the work but places like this forum help the learning curve a lot. I had no one to ask questions to when I started. Actually I was on mturk for a week, saw how much requesters were paying and said F this. My account was collecting dust until I got on reddit and saw the numbers people were putting up. That's when I started asking questions. Once I got my boots laced and someone told me about closed quals that decided to be my main focus. I didn't even even know that they existed before but that's where the real money is at.

@urtho9 - another good piece of advice that helped me when I first started out is to do easy batches until you get 1000 approved hits. Once I hit 1000 a lot of other hits became available to me. You need to be in the daily turk threads on here and /r/mturk on reddit too because people are always namedropping good requesters. Read all the comments, not just the ones on top. That's where the real nuggets are.

 

Night turking has been considerably worse for the past several months. I used to do ~$10/hr of non-qualed work fairly consistently most nights from 11PM-3AM PST. Recently I'm lucky to clear ~$10 during that same period.

The fact is that the overwhelming majority of good paying non-qual work drops from 6AM-3PM PST, Tuesday-Friday. Sometimes Monday is strong, and very occasionally there will be something worth doing over the weekends, but usually it's fairly anemic. Also, a good deal of good paying work is multi-media, typically audio but also video, so there's not a great way to get around that. I suppose you could use your turk earnings to get an unlimited tethering data plan, but you would need to have sufficient turk income to offset those costs for it to be worthwhile.

Your circumstance of trying work on a limited data connection, at night, with potential interruptions from work preventing you from getting into a good rhythm is a difficult problem to overcome. I have a similar circumstance, although my window of availability to turk while working is from 12PM-7PM PST, so I have a little more flexibility. For your night time turking woes, there's really not a solution other than:

1. Get lucky
2. Hope some requesters return to night drops
3. Get closed batches that drop at night, or at least large enough to be available for more than 24 hours

There are some things you can do proactively, though.

If you don't have at least 10k HITs approved yet, that should be your goal, regardless of pay. Doing $100 of penny batch HITs, or even uncompensated HITs, will do you significantly more good in the long run than trying to pick up a few HITs here or there every night. If you have days off of work, spend them grinding HITs until you reach that threshold. That will open you up to the largest potential pool of HITs, and hopefully you'll pick up a few quals during that time.

The other thing is to make sure you pay attention to any available qual HITs as they pop up. Even just lurking the daily thread here will give you the opportunity for a few quals. I assume reddit is similar, but as it's a wretched hive of scum and villainy I don't personally ever use it. I suppose you could ask @Randomacts about reddit though, he always seems to be stirring up some sort of trouble there.


Another alternative is to do what I do, which is Turk whenever you aren't working or sleeping, eliminate all non-productive activity in your life, and to reduce the amount of time wasted sleeping by as much as you can tolerate without collapse. Of course, most people don't tolerate radically reduced sleep well, or the total social isolation this requires to be an effective strategy, but it is an option to consider.

 

/r/mturk only rarely is useful. People are better off just asking for help here like in this thread ect.

 

I watched a few videos after I got home from work this morning showing exactly how to do a few specific receipt batches, may start picking those up here and there between doing surveys even though they are only worth $0.01. Something that would be really cool is if someone did a compilation of helpful videos, esp ones showing how to correctly complete particular types without getting rejections. As far as scripts I'm using, I have so many at this point I'm not even sure if I am making efficient or even correct use of them, but here is the list:

MTurk suite
HIT Forker
HIT Scraper to MTurk Suite
HIT Scraper WITH EXPORT
JR Mturk Panda Crazy
JR Mturk Panda Crazy Helper
mmmturkeybacon Enhanced HIT Information
Mturk Engine
MTurk HIT Database MK. II
TurkerViewJS
Turkmaster


As of this moment, after getting screwed by Synapse previously, I have managed to get my approval rating back up to 91.18%. Prior to him I was at 98%, and I know this doesn't help because there are a lot of batches that require 95% or even higher. It also makes me a lot more timid to take on tasks I'm not familiar with which certainly does not help.

 

Ok so you've got a shit ton going on there and they are going to slow things down significantly.


Keep these
TurkerViewJS
JR Mturk Panda Crazy
JR Mturk Panda Crazy Helper
HIT Forker

Someone can even chime in if Crazy helper is even needed these days as it may not be with Forker.

 

my "elapsed" keeps jumping up like CRAZY! it will literally go from 1000 to 2000+ in less than 60 seconds. Also does the "pre's: xxx" mean anything. i thought i read somewhere that it was bad BUT i can't find it again, and have no idea what to do about it.



these are the scripts i have:

as well as task archive, and suite.

maybe it means nothing but it just started doing it and now im freaking out.



this is right now. i can restart the cycle and it will go back down but its jumping so quick!

 

Your PREs are your page request errors. Generally, when you submit more than ~1 request per second, you'll receive the "You've exceeded the Allowable Page Request Rate" page from mturk. Unless you're working fast on a penny batch, you shouldn't run into this problem unless your scraper of choice is set to poll too quickly. Set it to something reasonable like ~1000ms to avoid conflicts with panda crazy. Even if your scraper is set to a very long duration, though, every so often you'll just happen to have both PC and your scraper try to poll at the same time you're opening or submitting a HIT, so you'll always end up with a few pre's. I usually get something like 2 an hour.

If you get into a big quick batch, you might even consider turning both off; if you're grinding CIs you're dropping ~$1-3 an hour if you're getting a couple of pre's per minute.

Sometimes the page request limit can go as high as 2-3 seconds per query, presumably when Jeffy B is using the mturk server to host lan server for a game of Quake.

 

That's what is so crazy is it does this when I'm not doing penny batches. Im literally just waiting on surveys. I uninstalled everything and reinstalled it all hoping it will be better today. My panda, hit forker are running on default settings and this is my archive:



Sorry to be such a bother, but this is just driving me nuts!!

 

Does my task archive auto-acceptor effect this?

 

update. it is my auto acceptor causing this. so i turned off the auto acceptor and poof pre's gone. now i just gotta figure out what about my auto acceptor is causing this.