Most tasks pay a dime or less, and there is a daily churn of tasks that pay only a penny.

And the weird thing is that workers — mostly American workers — will do them, for many different reasons.

People turk to save for a motorcycle. They turk to buy insulin. They turk to pay off debt or pass the time profitably while on the clock at a boring job.

Some do it because there are few decent-paying jobs that can be done at will. People who are confined to their homes by disability or social anxiety or who live where there are few jobs do it because, despite lousy wages, it seems like the best option.

Plenty turk full time. In a 2016 Pew Research Center survey of nearly 3,000 American turkers, a quarter said they made most or all of their earned income on the platform. More than half the turkers surveyed said they earned under $5 an hour.

Does anyone here do Amazon M Turk? I do it myself and I have been doing it taking it seriously for about 14 months now and I have made like $3,000 off of it. I've had the account for five years but only within the past 14 months have I started to take it seriously. There is a lot of patience here but I can make a good chunk of change. If you are into surveys and doing microtasks, this is probably the best option out there. Most other survey sites don't cut it for me like MTurk does.

I think the article assumes that way too many people are just doing penny HITs but most people I hear on the MTurk subreddit do all they can to avoid low paying hits unless it is a two second task. Penny HITs are not where to go unless you want to build up the amount of HITs you've done.