Much overdue update

So it's been a while :)

I asked a question in my last post: could I take a break from turking to enjoy something else (a vacation, etc) and still want to come back to it?

Apparently, the answer is yes. Over the summer I stepped away from turking for a few days to a week on several occasions, and I still came back. And I'm doing very well.

Here's my latest: it's been almost 6 months now since I created my mturk account. As of this writing, I have submitted 14,003 HITs, 13,997 approved, 6 rejected. I am still working primarily for Crowdsurf, and that's been an interesting ride as they have started making some moves to leave mturk (or at least offer an alternative that will pay a better rate than mturk in order to encourage us to leave).

Mturk more than doubled the rates it charges requesters over the summer. Several large requesters have already left, and the increase will likely curtail or cut off participation from some smaller academic requesters whose surveys have been previously been an mturk staple. I'm not sure how much of this is seasonal and how much of it is a reaction to the price hike, but it seems like at any given time, there are fewer HITs available overall, and those that are available are mostly very low paying HITs.

But on the plus side, mturk doesn't have any sort of noncompete or user agreement that says you can't work for a requester outside of mturk, so I'm guessing requesters will continue to post penny jobs to mturk and take their more experienced workers elsewhere for higher paying jobs.

And speaking of higher pay... at the time of my last post, one month in, I was thrilled to make over $100 in a week. Now... I usually have one day each week where my total is over $100. So yeah... I still think it's worthwhile to continue to turk :)