Individuals can now join lists of people with similar skills to start receiving targeted, paid microtasks.
Individuals can now make money online by joining lists of people with similar skills and completing targeted, paid microtasks. All you need to do is apply to one of the lists enumerated here. If accepted to a list, you will receive a stream of list-specific tasks sent by businesses that you can complete to earn money or fund charities.
Here are three concrete examples of how Earn.com lists work:
If you are a Python programmer, apply to the Python list to get paid to reply to recruiters and complete surveys on new technologies.
If you are a Bitcoin or Ethereum holder, apply to the Bitcoin or Ethereum lists to allow the founders of new ICOs and distributed ledger products to pay to reach you prior to their launch.
If you are a Stanford student or affiliate, apply to the Stanford list to get compensated by entrepreneurs who want to hire you or have you try out new apps intended for college campuses.
These are just three examples; the full set of lists is available here. You can apply to multiple lists, but you’ll be best served by applying to those lists where you’re likely to gain membership.
If you run a conference, own an email list, or otherwise manage a community group, we are also rolling out tools for you to create and monetize your own lists. You can sign up for early access here.
In addition to the basic concepts of joining or creating Earn.com lists to make money online, we’ve developed several useful features to make the process of making money from lists even easier. Let’s go through these in turn.
Professional Biography and Automatic List Joining
If you are an individual, you can enable these features on your profile by clicking here, logging in, and setting the toggles as shown below:
Regarding the professional biography feature, you can think of it as analogous to Airbnb’s professional photography feature. It’s a free service that you can enable to allow Earn.com to optimize your profile and increase your revenue, while still maintaining full control. Here’s an example of a profile before and after optimization:
As for the “Join lists” feature, it is self-explanatory: Earn.com will maximize your income by adding you to the lists that fit your skills most directly. Each new list you join or are added to is then displayed on your profile page, as shown below:
Finally, if you are on a list page such as Earn.com/engineers, you can apply to join the list at any time by simply clicking the “Apply” button, as seen below:
That’s a whirlwind tour of all the new features related to lists. You can now get started exploring the set of all Earn.com lists enumerated here. We’ll be adding search and filtering functionality soon, but for now you can browse the lists and apply to the ones that suit you.
With that said, while the overall concept of making money online by joining Earn.com lists is straightforward, there are several interesting wrinkles that we discuss below.
Lists are a way for average internet users to make money through Earn.com
The first profiles we advertised at Earn.com were for well-known individuals like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, famous people capable of driving significant traffic to their Earn.com profiles as individuals. And the first lists that we launched at Earn.com were for well-known groups like VCs and angels, again capable of driving significant traffic to their pages on the basis of name recognition.
However, the new set of lists we’re launching today along with the ability to apply to lists greatly opens up the space to allow a much larger number of people to make money through Earn.com. Our ideal is that every verified Earn.com user should qualify for one or more lists, and thereby be able to attract paid messages and tasks even if they aren’t famous.
An Earn.com list membership as microconsulting
Gaining acceptance to a Earn.com list means gaining access to what one can think of as paid microconsulting, as something in between an Amazon Mechanical Turk-style microtask and a conventional job. By microconsulting we refer to the steady stream of paying microtasks that you are qualified for by dint of your Earn.com list membership. Depending on the selectivity of the Earn.com list that you gain admission to, the expected income for a given list’s annual stream of microconsulting work should be on the order of $10 to $1000+ per year. By joining multiple lists, you can increase your earnings.
Your list price is different from your profile price
The price to contact you through a list may be quite different from the price that you set on your individual profile page. For most people, they will be able to attract more traffic and money from their list memberships than through their individual Earn.com profile. For example, a young Stanford student may not have many Google searches for their own name, but they may get significant monthly traffic in paid messages as part of the Stanford ACM list.
Even for a person with higher name recognition, they may only be able to attract a few direct messages per day at $100/message. But if they have the time to answer more messages per day, it may still be a rational decision for them to answer a few more list-initiated messages per day at $50/message if they are seeking to maximize their income (or their donations to charity).
More selective lists pay more per task
Different lists pay different amounts of money on a per-task basis. For example, the Earn.com/vc list pays $50 per task, while the Earn.com/students list pays $1 per task. This has at least two implications. First, lists that pay more money will tend to be more selective, just as real-world jobs that are more lucrative tend to be harder to get. Second, people that join multiple lists will tend to center around a particular price-per-message. For example, it would be surprising for someone who qualified for a $50-per-task list to join a $0.10-per-task list, but not surprising for them to join another $50-per-task list.
Get accepted to an Earn.com list by validating an email, taking an exam, or passing peer review
Each list has different acceptance criteria. For a list like Earn.com/stanford, acceptance is simply contingent upon setting up an Earn.com account with a filled out profile and a valid stanford.edu email.
For other lists, validation of membership may be based on peer review, technical examination, or cryptographic test. For example, you may be occasionally asked to sign a transaction as part of a task to prove that you still hold a particular digital currency, or to answer a technical question to confirm that you still have expertise in Python.
Please note that even if accepted to a list, membership is subject to ongoing review. Periodically, validation tasks may be sent out to confirm that members are in good standing. For example, a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for a user to remain on the Earn.com/stanford list is to periodically pass an email validation check to prove that they still have a valid stanford.edu email address.
With that said, we will endeavor to minimize the burden on users to prove that they belong to a list while simultaneously maximizing the integrity and consistency of each list as a whole.
All list members get the same price-per-task
As of today, acceptance to a list is a binary condition: either you are in the list or you are not. As such, all members of a list are considered equal given that they have passed the same binary acceptance criteria. This means that all list members receive the same price per completed task. If this proves problematic for any given list, there is always the option of creating new lists with higher prices where all members agree that the others are of similar skill.
Creating and managing new lists
We will be launching many more types of lists in the near future, but feel free to suggest new ones here. In addition, as noted above, if you run a conference, own an email list, or otherwise manage a community group, we are also rolling out tools for you to create and monetize your own lists. You can sign up for early access here.
Conclusion
In closing, Earn.com lists provide a way for the average individual to make money online. You need not be famous; you need only join lists of people with similar skills to start receiving targeted, paid microtasks.
To apply to the first set of lists, go ahead and browse Earn.com/lists and apply to those that fit your skills. Once a list reaches critical mass, you should start to see a stream of paid emails and tasks. As always, please get in touch with us at support@earn.com or our Facebook community if you have any questions.