CrowdSource is a company that recently bought out Cloud Crowd (do you remember that one?). This company hires home-based workers to do short tasks as well as writing and editing jobs. Some of you may already be familiar with CrowdSource thanks to the many different tasks they post at Amazon Mturk. I know I’ve seen them and done a few on there myself. The work you do for CrowdSource is through the Amazon Mturk platform as of now. However, I read on their blog that they are working on something that will allow you to do work for CrowdSource outside of the Mturk system.
You can do work for CrowdSource no matter where you’re at in the world, but it is my understanding that you can’t get paid via bank transfer from Mturk if you’re outside the United States. I believe you can still work for deposits into your Amazon account that you can use for shopping if you are outside the US. Hopefully if CrowdSource gets their own work platform set up, it will allow non-US workers to get paid, too.
As mentioned above, you can do short tasks like image tagging, transcription, and website categorization — easy things that don’t take much time. They also have occasional writing and editing jobs, but they may not always need help for those. The writing and editing jobs are larger projects that pay more. You can click here to see the full list of work they have available right now on Mturk.
The pay for the easier tasks is low, usually not more than .10 cents each. For writing, CrowdSource pays between $0.02/word and $0.035/word. Because they do everything via the Mturk platform, you can get paid several times per week either via direct deposit to your bank account or in Amazon money you can use to shop at Amazon. You only need to have $1 earned to transfer your money to your bank.
CrowdSource does seem to pretty much always have tasks posted at Mturk. However, this is the sort of thing you wouldn’t want to count on for paying all your bills because the pay will be on the lower side. If you’re just starting out doing tasks for CrowdSource, I’d think of it as extra money or a work from home “egg” to have in your basket. It could definitely come in handy if work dries up with the other sites you use, especially since you can get payments so frequently.
There are some reviews posted at Glassdoor you may want to check out, although notice before you read them which ones are coming from people working in-house and which ones are coming from home-based workers. Also notice the dates — there are a few reviews from disgruntled people, most of whom were writers or editors for CrowdSource, but these are a little old, too. There is one from this year where a worker was complimenting CrowdSource on improving from how things used to be.
To get started, you just go here and fill in your details. Then, select whether you’re interested in microtasks or writing/editing jobs. I do not believe they are recruiting writers and editors at this time, but it looks like you can still get your information submitted for when they are. You can also go here to express your interest in the writing HITs and get put on the list to take their writing test once it opens back up. After you submit your details, you’ll get an email prompting you to create an account with Mturk if you don’t already have one. If you find anything confusing, CrowdSource has an excellent Workforce Support section on their website with all the info you need for all the different tasks and getting yourself set up to do the work. It also looks like they are very interactive with their workers. Most of the questions I see posted are not going unanswered by admin.
Do you do any tasks at CrowdSource? If so, please comment below and let me know what you think of it. And if you’re interested in MORE sites like this (it’s always a good idea to work a lot of them), you can see a list here of other sites that are similar.
