Mechanical Turk has a terrible person hours:revenue ratio if you live in a developed country. Not as familiar with the others, but I think Elance tends to pay pretty poorly too.
From what I gather, it depends in part on the person. I never figured out elance but at one time was making over $200/week on textbroker. Yes, I felt the ratio amounted to slave labor but I was also clear a lot of the difficulties were on my end, not theirs. I am currently trying to develop my own sites, which have never made anywhere near $200/week. I remain torn between going back to those slave wages and continuing to gamble my time on a possible pay off somewhere down the road while, in the mean time, there is no income.
Contract programming? Try advertising on Kijiji/Craigstlist. There's always people out there who will pay you to make a website. Takes away the risk of not making anything from the site.
I don't happen to be a programmer. I have skills at doing things the world says cannot be done. There appears to be no money in either doing the impossible nor in trying to share information on how to do so.
Oh, sure. I'm talented at solving certain kinds of "personal" and social problems. Doing so tends to leave no evidence, thus I get called a teller of tall tales. Some issues I have addressed:
Recovery from child sexual abuse. I talk about that sort of/some on a blog called November West.
Raising and effectively educating very challenging children. I talk about that on a site called Kids Like Mine.
Getting well when doctors say it cannot be done. I talk about that on a site called Health Gazelle.
I don't know how to get traffic or effectively monetize any of them, in spite of the big reaction it often gets out of the handful of people that read them.
Last I was on (which was a couple of years ago) you could get a good hourly rate (>$20/hr) if you knew how to sort the HITs properly. There were a lot of tasks where the payoff per task was very low, and if you believed their estimate of how much time it took per task the hourly rate was very low, but the task was actually much quicker than they estimated.
For example, a "which of these things is not like the other ones" type task might be estimated as taking 15 seconds, but if you're in the zone you can do them in 5 seconds, netting you 3x the hourly rate.
