Yeah, oDesk is bullshit. Sure, it's possible to make US minimum wage there if you spend lots and lots of time marketing yourself. But you'll spend so much time trying to get clients, your wage decreases to less than $3 an hour.
I don't want to give any information about my odesk profile for the number of views that mturkforum gets, I don't want to lose any potential employers who might be surfing this website.
Odesk is great for indians and you will mostly find indian profiles more along with filipinos who are much cheaper than indians. Why do this filipinos quote such a low rate like $1 an hour, how can they survive. A $1 for each filipino head brought to me on a platter.
US based clients need to pay around US minimum wage, or they're shitheads. Period. No good, attentive worker who is fluent in English should work for less than $7 an hour.
Maybe, you should browse the contractors profiles. some filipinos over there are highly qualified with years of experience in english writing but still they charge like $3 an hour. It's because of this cheap but quality work that so many american companies are moving to Odesk. It's not like you will demand $7 and you will get it, what you will get is an empty coffer with that. Just think, everybody wants to save money and why would anybody pay $7 when they can get a quality job done at $3. We are not communists.
I found these posts of sharique's, from this thread, fascinating---especially when you check out alian1980's post that others are quoting, and when you notice how incredibly hostile and suspicious he has been about the book I wrote. It seemed like quoting them here was the best way to ensure they weren't changed before others saw them.
Naturegirl, why don't you just admit that you want to sell your stupid transcription book and that's the only intention why you've joined this forum and nothing else. I'm sure that you market on other forum also and you're not a full time turker which you say you're but a person who falsely emphatize with other turkers and tries to build a rapport so that later on it's easy to sell stuff to them. That's good old marketing 101.
I hate fake people like you who think other people are stupid enough to be fooled and taken advantage of.
I apologize for the confusion! I replied to it because the same person who seems quite deceptive here is baselessly calling me a liar/scammer/whatever on another thread and is very persistent about it. So I linked to it from the other thread to demonstrate that sometimes, one has to consider the source of those kinds of accusations. (you're right, it doesn't really contain useful information beyond that!)