This isn’t new but I just found it. Amazon.com has a site were you can submit very repatative jobs for real people to do.

The site is Mturk.com, which stands for mechanical turk. The story goes that in the 1700s a man went around with a machine that played chess and almost always won. The “inventor” claimed it was just a machine when the reality was a real person was inside.

The cool thing here is that Amazon has an actual API that you can use to insert this in to your site. Typical jobs pay between pennies up to a dollar or more. The possibilities could be anything from moderating user photos to finding information that requires a telephone call to a local business.

Something really stuck out at me here. Most of these “queries” pay pennies. 562 tasks at 3 cents a piece for a total of $16.86. 1 pod cast transcription for $1.47. These aren’t first world wages.