You could make above minimum wage if there was actually a quantity of good HITs to choose to work.
Someone somewhere must've written a guide about sourcing SEO articles from MTurk because I used to write 150 word article summaries (more for fun than anything, liked to try to go as fast as possible, they provide link, you summarize, even if the source article is less than 150 words, so its more like rephrasing) for between $0.25-$0.50/summary. There was usually only about 30 summaries on any given day which makes me think it was involved as a part of a guide or someone's startup maybe because the requesters were almost always different.
Somedays there would be several hundred. I made over $15 in an hour on a few occasions, but it wouldn't be a consistent source of income.
It's very unlikely. I tried it a couple months ago just for the experience, and in the ~1.5 hours I spent, I may have made $5. I honestly don't understand why anyone would participate as a worker on the site.
That's more than the minimum wage where I live, and I am in Europe. I suppose there are many countries with people that would be happy to work for that rate.
From what I've read, there are 3 popular demographics that are happy working on MTurk: 1) People living in areas where a non-strenuous, $5/hour is hard to come by. 2) People who are bored and find MTurk a somewhat interesting way to make some spare cash (stay-at-home parents, elderly, students) 3) People who are bored of sitting in front of a screen at work all day with nearly nothing to do (security guards, cashiers) and could use some extra cash
I believe plenty of people do it for a leisure activity rather than to make a living. Sort of like putting puzzles together or surfing the web. Some workers may even be at a dull job (such as a tollbooth operator at night) and their boss doesn't mind.
