Newly unemployed and labeling photos for pennies

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B.C. Kowalski, a writer at the local weekly in Wausau, Wisconsin, was expecting a boost to his income this spring. He was set to begin selling ads for local businesses on a podcast he'd launched on the side, Keep it Wausome. Then coronavirus restrictions shut down the town and its businesses.

To keep some extra dollars coming in, Kowalski has turned to Amazon's crowd-work platform Mechanical Turk, where companies offer cents or dollars for small tasks such as labeling photos, transcribing audio clips, or answering survey questions.

Diane Brewer, who lives in Florida, is also counting on Mechanical Turk, as well as another crowd-work site called Prolific, where workers are paid to fill out surveys for academia and market research. She previously turned to crowd work during spells as a stay-at-home mom and convalescing after a car crash. Covid-19 convinced Brewer it was time to start again "to add some dollars to an uncertain future," she says. Her long-term boyfriend works as a carpenter. "That may be an issue in the near future, because who is going to buy a house anytime soon?" she asks.

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