Opinion of Amazon's mturk.com

Agree with you. Have used it a few times and didn't find it to be very user-friendly. I've had much better luck with Scriptlance or Elance.

It's a cool concept and I've seen people do some great things with it. Didn't really work for me though.

I'm new to mturk myself but I have already figured how to get what I want from the workers for cheap -- this might anger a few of the warriors here that are ghostwriters -- don't get me wrong - I really like to write myself when I have the time -- but mturk workers can write certain types of content if you know how to ask them and they do it quickly and for pennies on the dollar when compared to professional ghostwriters who charge a lot more and make you wait.

I believe you should just jump in with a simple project to get your feet wet and get a feel for how the system works. Start by asking workers to click a link for example and ask them to describe the site. From your experience you will figure out ways to make the most out of mturk. Think of the few dollars you spent as a requester as a way for you to fine tune your approach. That's how you improve the results you get from mturk workers. Tweak something about your work request each time until you get exactly what you want. I now have a template that I can use everytime I want content created and it works like magic. Yes you can get content created that is 300 words or more and is written by people who speak fluent English and grammatical or spelling mistakes are minimal.

I did not spend much time on the site but I really did not understand it all that well.