Just when I thought that I had seen it all as far as home-based business opportunities go, I found a somewhat weird yet interesting type of work that people can do from home. Piece work is a type of employment where you are paid for what you produce, instead of the time that you spend working. Although piece work has been around for years and years, the internet has opened up new possibilities for the types of things that piece workers can produce.
One of the companies that offers online piece work opportunities is actually quite large and reputable. Amazon.com has a division called “Mechanical Turk” where companies that need piece work done can post tasks, and piece workers can select the tasks that they wish to complete. The division’s interesting name comes from its purpose, providing human intelligence where a machine simply won’t do. The Mechanical Turk was a hoax that took place in the 1700s and 1800s where a machine (The Mechanical Turk) was said to be able to beat human players at the game of chess. It was only a hoax, though, because the “machine” had a human chess player concealed inside of it. Tasks on the Mechanical Turk web site are called HITs, which stands for Human Intelligence Tasks – things that humans can do that computers cannot. I looked at a few HITs and they include things like transcribing audio files, web searches, verifying information, and other such things.
The pay for each HIT ranges from pennies for simple tasks to ten dollars or more for more complex tasks that require more time and effort. The more complex tasks may require that you have certain qualifications, some of which you can take actions to earn and others which you earn by completing other HITs and completing them well. Since HITs that do not require qualifications are the easiest to get when you first start this type of work, please be advised that they are also the lowest paying HITs. You may wish to calculate how many of them you can get done per hour to see whether doing this kind of work is worth your time and effort. Although the pay is not very high, one good thing about Mechanical Turk is the fact that you can get the work right away, when you have a little spare time. This, to me, is how online piece work can be most useful to home-based professionals, as a supplement to their regular home-based work.