A month of your time for only $20!
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a website where people or companies can post little work assignments (Human Intelligence Tasks or HITS) for people that are tasks that computers cannot do well, but humans can. For instance, deciding which photo best represents an address or transcripe a speech are tasks that are better done by humans. Therefore a person can post a HIT and assign a reward amount to it, and then someone comes along does the work, requestor approves it and the worker gets paid. Pretty simple huh?
Most of the times, it is a resonable trade of work vs. reward amount, but sometimes it can just be silly. Right now, there is a HIT with a $20.00 reward for writing a 50,000 – 55,000 word romance novel. 50,000 words is about 175 pages worth of writing according to the Washington Post. I remember how long it took me to write 30 page papers back in college, let along 175 pages. If you have enough time to spend writing that much and then just trading it to someone for a mere $20 bucks with no rules set about copywrite or other explaination of what they were going to do with your work, I really would wonder about you and your priorities. You could spend the same amount of time that you spent on that novel, work at McDonalds and come out ahead dollar wise.
I am not saying that it is wrong to spend your time writing a romance novel if that is your thing, but to expect someone to trade it away for $20 is just a little boggling.