I'm looking for piecemeal work to earn a few extra bucks.

October 5, 2009 5:41 PM

Is there something equivalent to Amazon's mechanical turk that doesn't involve spamming, signing up for mailing lists or stealing content?

Basically, I took a look at the mechanical turk, and it seems like 95% of the HITs are 'post this spam on your favourite forum for 5 cents' or 'rewrite this article so we can steal it and not give attribution to the author'.

Essentially, I am looking to make a few extra bucks from my laptop in my off hours when I feel like it. I'm in Canada as well, so that might make it a bit trickier.

Are there any other options out there that aren't scams?

posted by WinnipegDragon to Work & Money (5 answers total)

Textbroker.com
posted by kylej at 5:50 PM on October 5, 2009 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: I was under the impression that Textbroker is US only though? I'll check it out.
posted by WinnipegDragon at 5:52 PM on October 5, 2009

Response by poster: Yeah, it's US only.
posted by WinnipegDragon at 5:53 PM on October 5, 2009

Response by poster: Guess that's a no then :)
posted by WinnipegDragon at 6:57 AM on October 6, 2009

Depending on your morals, you could pretend to be in the USA (use a proxy server, friends address, etc.) for textbroker.com

Or how about chacha and/or kgb ? (sorry don't have links) - the services that answer questions that users text to them. I think chacha pays 20c (US) per answered question.

Or how about Mturk and you can just not sign up for the HITS that you don't approve of (ie the 5%) ? MT itself isn't a scam in any way - even if some of the uses people put it to are questionable .

Good luck.
posted by Xhris at 8:07 AM on October 6, 2009