There are some computer based tasks that computers cannot do as well as humans. Instead of hiring people full time to perform such services, many companies turn to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website. There you can sign-up and get paid to perform simple tasks.

To get an idea of how profitable the site could be, I created an account and began working on a few Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs). After practicing with a few, I thought I’d time myself. I was able to complete 69 HITs in 10 minutes. The HITs I was working on paid $0.02 each, so I earned $1.38 in 10 minutes, or $8.28 an hour. More complicated HITs would take longer, but pay more.

The good news is that I was quickly able to make a little bit of money for doing a very simple task. The bad news is that $8.28 an hour is not exactly going to make me rich and working intently on the HITs (even for only 10 minutes straight) got old in a hurry.

There are many types of HITs, so you might be able to find higher paying ones that make you more per hour and are less intense. I don’t think Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is going to make anyone rich, but to earn a few dollars a day it is a viable option. I could imagine people using MTurk to do something like justify their daily trip to Starbucks by earning an equivalent amount completing HITs.