How to Earn $100/Week or More with Reddit
If you’ve ever dipped your toes into Reddit, you know it has a subreddit community for everything. There’s r/thronescomics for people who want comics about Game of Thrones, r/nosleep for sharing scary stories, even r/popping for people who enjoy chatting about popping pimples.
And then there’s the Reddit community that’ll get you an extra $100 a week.
No, it’s not r/beermoney. (That subreddit is full of people asking how to earn more money, not actively earning it.)
It’s r/hitsworthturkingfor.
Join HITs Worth Turking For and Maximize your MTurk Income
HITs Worth Turking For is a community of Redditors dedicated to maximizing their Mechanical Turk income.
Not familiar with MTurk? Here’s a quick rundown of this popular Amazon service, where you earn money by completing HITs, or “human intelligence tasks,” such as tagging photos, evaluating content or answering surveys.
As new Turkers quickly learn, MTurk has a lot of HITs: usually over 300,000 available for the taking. However, many of these HITs require a large time investment in exchange for a low payout, like a HIT that requires five minutes of work but only pays 10 cents.
To maximize your MTurk income, you need to find the HITs that give a high payout relative to your time investment. Many new Turkers assume this means searching for the highest value HITs and completing them first — but that’s not necessarily the case. Some high-value HITs, such as the surveys that pay $1.00 or more, are not worth their payout simply because it takes far too long to complete them.
Consider the Value vs. Time Equation
Your goal as a Turker is to find the perfect balance of value vs. time. Consider the following equation:
(Value/Time)*Quantity
Let’s look at two options: a single survey that takes 15 minutes to complete and pays 50 cents, and a series of image-tagging HITs that each take 3 minutes to complete and pay 15 cents.
The survey pays 3.33 cents a minute, and you can only complete it once. The image-tagging HITs, on the other hand, pay 5 cents a minute, and you can likely complete 50 or more if you have enough time available.
Of course, few Turkers have the time to sift through all 300,000+ MTurk HITs and find the ones that best fulfill the value vs. time equation.
But a Reddit community can easily do what an individual Turker cannot, which is how HITs Worth Turking For was born.
How does HITs Worth Turking For Identify Good HITs?
Members are encouraged to search for and share HITs that pay at least 10 cents per minute. Then, other Redditors complete the HITs and offer up their feedback: yes, it’s a good hit; no, it took too long to complete; etc. The best HITs get upvoted so that everyone has a chance to complete them. Find a HIT that’s no good? Add it to the sister subreddit, HITs NOT Worth Turking For.
Why should Redditors take time out of their MTurking schedule to share these HITs? Because no single person can find all the good HITs on his or her own. Or, to quote the subreddit directly:
In a community such as this, if I find a good paying HIT, I post it. That lets you do that HIT too! You then find a good paying HIT later and post it, now I can do it and make more money than if I had gone it alone. Now imagine if 50 people were in that community all posting good paying HITs. No one would ever have to do another lousy paying HIT again.
(The other reason why Redditors post HITs to the HITs Worth Turking For subreddit? Every month, the 10 highest voted posts and the top five contributors each receive a payout funded by the HITs Worth Turking For community, which further incentivizes community members to post as many good HITs as possible.)
How HITs Worth Turking For Helped Me
When I started MTurking in 2012, I earned $20 during my first week as a Turker after completing 74 HITs.
Then I started using the resources at HITs Worth Turking For.
Here were my payouts for the next several weeks:
That’s the power of this community. Whether you contribute HITs or simply use the HITs other contributors post, you’ll be able to increase your MTurk income far beyond what you ever could do on your own.
Your Turn: Have you worked for MTurk? Will you try using HITs Worth Turking For to find good HITs?
Nicole Dieker is a freelance copywriter and essayist. She writes regularly for The Billfold on the intersection of freelance writing and personal finance, and her work has also appeared in The Toast, Yearbook Office, and Boing Boing.
