Adding value with online work?

Adding value

There is a large demand for work that can be done from home. Scammers know people want this and want easy money and thus there is plenty of bait sitting and waiting for people to fall victim to. Putting those scams aside, there is some legitimate work that can be done such as audio transcription, however with automation arriving and the very little amount of value added earning small rewards for hours of work it might as well be a scam. Services like Mturk simply pay a few pennies for completing tasks, and there are complaints of fraud with even the smallest of payouts. Micro jobs are simply not a sustainable way to earn an income. With the hours of time spent completing tasks on Mturk, filling out surveys, or whatever may be taking minimal effort with your time; they could be better spent volunteering to build a proper resume for better options down the road.
Scams cheat people out of money, and since time is money, if you’re spending hours on tasks that earn a few dollars in a month then a connection can be made. There are insightful ways to identify a scam such as if one has to pay in order to work, and if payouts are made on a standard basis. Another key way to identify a scam is how much value you are adding compared to what you can be adding. For example, if you spend hours in a day filling out surveys and earn a dollar or two in a week when you could contribute to GitHub projects, volunteer opportunities at home or out, or monetize your personal skills then you are scamming yourself out of chances to build your resume and to hone your skills getting you closer to working your passion.
Examining the problems with these zero-effort micro jobs, the negative effects that are most apparent come from passive monetization and inefficiency. If a task can be done without effort, then one cannot expect to improve or move on. There is no skill to enhance and thus there is no skill to reward. Value is derived from people using their skills to produce things other people want. Clicking buttons, watching videos, and looking at ads does not add anything of value for anyone. To add value is to introduce complexity such as a $1 pen to write on a $2 set of papers, a story worth thousands to readers. Adding complexity, collaborating, and improving is a sensible path to a secure income.
Rather than waiting for offers to appear online for a small task, work on your own time doing what you like. Work hard on what you like to do, and you will improve. As you improve you will find yourself with a portfolio of your work that can be pointed to as a solid example of what you can do. Armed with a portfolio and a built resume, you will find yourself with a decent foundation to ascend from. Cutting the wasted time, and working hard with what you have left is a good standard for wealth compared to simply how much revenue whatever one may be earning with something.

Efficiency

Ads are ignored and the most common interaction with ads is to close them out, skip, or mute them. They are usually irrelevant to what is being searched for which is why there is almost no engagement with ads. The most invasive and obnoxious ads are not even consideration to typical consumers, and is a wasteful, inefficient, and unreliable method to monetize work. On the other hand, word of mouth solves the relevancy problem and can be of more monetary value for both parties. By embedding on topic videos and images with a referral as advertising, the party that is advertising gets engagement and more than a glance at their service while the host gets monetization revenue. If one is looking to have a presentation or idea advertised, as an example, an embed of that presentation in an article or video related to the subject of the advertised idea then it goes a longer way than reliance on third party networks that may be outright blocked by the end user.
Affiliate marketing is also a more efficient strategy due to the fact that it is based on the affiliate’s performance rather than mass propagation of a message. A good performance can balance out any issues between relevance and relatedness for a product. Embeds and affiliate marketing can go hand in hand as they do on this site, and supplement each other for an engaging form of outreach built on trust. Minimizing ad usage to silent, low-bandwidth, safe, that is not content intrusive may work better to fill gaps in revenue rather than being the primary source.

Passive Services and Automation

The sharing economy has allowed people to provide services that makes use of their time and resources in ways that have been previously impossible. Points of sale have been optimized past the need for any paper exchanges to be made. Businesses such as Roost take advantage of this with their storage sharing model. Instead of leaving your extra belongings in a central storage facility, anyone with a spare room or spacious garage can rent out the space and earn a profit passively. Uber has done this for taxis, and Air B&B is famous for similar reasons. More and more, technology is being used to derive value from what would previously go to waste. It is difficult to say at this point if the sharing economy will be the future of jobs, but it is a likely contender as automation will dominate the service industry in the next 10 to 20 years.
Any job that requires repetitive or procedural tasks to be accomplished can and will be automated. Washing dishes, customer check out, driving, food preparation, and many other common tasks in the service industry will be automated which will likely displace 50% of the service work force. This is not necessarily a bad thing so long as this seismic shift in the working world is accounted for and a system is developed to compensate the lack of need for human labor. Benefits of this include drops in prices due to the evaporation of labor costs and down time from human needs such as income, breaks, vacations, time off, bonuses, and simply going home at the end of a shift. The change is not avoidable as any business that tries to hold onto its employees will not be able to compete with a business that automates at a fraction of the cost. Basic income, and a negative income tax are circulating in conversations about automation due to the new implications technology has for the future of work. Any solution would need to propose a shift from craft based wages to a different form to ensure unemployment and poverty does not boom. The future is bright with the need for work taken on by technology leaving time for people to make their own way in life by doing what they love.