A Task Site Overview

When many people think of working online, they still think of freelancing sites like Elance and Freelancer (formerly GetAFreeLancer). Sites like those still offer terrific opportunities for talented people to make money online, but they are not too friendly to rank amateurs. People without specific skills (such as ability in a programming language) have very few jobs they can bid on and a great deal of competition. Indeed, the whole bidding process turns off some -- every job has to be fought over. It's not unlike the rough and tumble job world which many people look online to try to escape away from.

You can think of task sites as a step down from freelancing sites, though I don't mean that in a derogatory way. What I mean is that task sites tend to have jobs that literally anyone can do -- most tasks don't require special skills. The element of competition is considerably reduced. Rather than competing with other workers on a bid basis, you instead just have to accept and complete a task in the time allotted and before all task slots are used up. I find task sites much more pleasant to use than freelancing ones, but if you have marketable skills freelancing sites can offer you considerably more income. With that said, let's discuss some of the task sites currently available.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk may well have originated the task site concept. What are simply called "tasks" on other sites MTurk calls HITs -- this stands for Human Intelligence Tasks. Whether it was the first of its kind or not, MTurk remains the biggest site in this sector by far. You can routinely find thousands of small jobs available on the site, and there is an enormous range of tasks. Transcription, surveys, and image tagging are just a few of the different job types. Unfortunately, the site doesn't categorize tasks so you have to either navigate through the entire list or use the search engine (which is pretty decent) to find particular tasks you're interested in. Different HITs pay dramatically different amounts of money -- simple ones may only pay a penny while some highly involved ones will pay you several dollars. If you are at all interested in tasks, you pretty much have to give MTurk a try...it's got the most activity of all the sites by far. However, it does have a few downsides. Only Americans and Indians can withdraw cash from the site; people from all other countries can only receive Amazon.com shopping credit for their work. MTurk pays Americans by electronic transfer and Indians by check (everyone also can redeem their earnings for Amazon credit)...no PayPal payments are available. Another unfortunate aspect of MTurk is that Amazon is fairly hands off about it. Scammers and spammers often post HITs that they have no intention of ever paying for. It is up to the users to be vigilant about what tasks they accept so they don't get cheated. You should definitely visit forums like Turker Nation and the smaller but friendlier mTurk Forum regularly so you can learn from other turkers' experiences and avoid the bad employers. Finally, it's very possible to lose your Mechanical Turk account. If too many requesters choose to ban you from working on their HITs, your whole MTurk account could be suspended, causing you to lose all prior earnings. It's possible but quite difficult to get a suspended account restored. For this reason, you should probably withdraw your money as soon as possible rather than let it accumulate indefinitely.

Microworkers is MTurk's most promising competitor. It pays by PayPal, Moneybookers, and Alertpay (minimum payment is $9) and welcomes users from all over the world, giving it one considerable advantage over MTurk. It is also more accepting of some task types that MTurk frowns on, like paid signups and social bookmarking. In fact, most tasks on MW are of the signup variety, including many CPA type offers that are US only. However, it's also one of the best sites to find high paying signup offers for PTCs and other GPT sites. MW also has true technical support...a wronged worker can even get an incorrectly rejected task reversed here. Unlike MTurk, Microworkers doesn't permit penny tasks -- each task is worth at least $0.10 which workers love. However, the number of tasks available here is also considerably smaller than MTurk; I usually see over a hundred available at a given time vs the thousands on Mechanical Turk. MW has a referral program, but it's tough to make money with it: you receive a bonus of $1 for each referral but only after they've earned $25. That may take some serious waiting unless you refer some very active users! All in all, I think Microworkers is a very good site; I especially appreciate how fairly they treat their workers.

Minuteworkers is one of the newer task sites that have cropped up recently. It is quite similar to Microworkers in many respects, but has a $10 minimum payout limit by PayPal. There are a fair number of tasks (mainly signups again) on offer here, but what really sets Minuteworkers apart is its referral system. They pay $0.05 per referral and give out a $0.10 bonus once your referral completes his or her first task. If you can deliver a steady stream of referrals to the site, those nickel and dime payments will really start to add up!

MyMicroJob is another Microworkers-like task site that is worth keeping an eye on. It has the fewest tasks available of the sites I've listed so far, but it seems to have a responsive and determined staff who are serious about making the site a success. Once again, the standout feature of this site is its referral program: here you get $0.10 per referral and a big $1.50 bonus if your referral reaches $10 or more. This is probably the best referral system currently offered by any task site. The downside is that for now the site is small, with a couple dozen tasks usually available...and, yes, they are mainly signups once again. Payout is $10 by PayPal, Alertpay, and Obopay, and the withdraw page features a handy chart that shows you the payment processor fees that'll be deducted from your payment. I wish all sites warned you ahead of time about those!

Finally, there's myLot. I've written previously about how it is one of my favorite online earning sites, but it's still very green when it comes to tasks. myLot is, without a doubt, the best paid to post forum on the Web. I had great hopes it would become one of the best task sites as well, but so far it hasn't really taken off as quickly as I expected. For this, I partially blame the notoriously opinionated myLot community. There were so many complaints about all the PTC signup offers that were filling up the task section in the early days that such offers were banned. Unlike most of the other sites I've talked about, myLot does not now allow paid signups. That wouldn't be so bad if there were other tasks to complete, but I rarely see more than a handful available at any given time. It's still a relatively new addition to the site so I plan to give it some more time. At least one feature is so sorely needed that I'm sure it will be added before long: if an employer posts a task and does not verify it has been completed after a certain amount of time, payment should be automatically awarded to the employee so you don't have a situation where there are a lot of "orphaned" tasks in limboland as currently is the case. Additionally, myLot might want to develop some sort of referral system for tasks in the future...currently it only gives referral earnings for posts. You should definitely join myLot for its other features -- the task section, for now, is a bit lacking!

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the opportunities on the other side of the task spectrum: you can of course make money by posting tasks as well as completing them. So, for instance, if you need referrals you might post a paid to signup offer on Microworkers. If you need content for a web site, you might post an article writing job on myLot. If you have some information on old paper forms you need transcribed to digital form, you might recruit the thousands of workers on MTurk to help you out. Don't settle for "just" being a worker if you have a great idea for a task of your own! You can even use your worker earnings to pay for your own tasks.