About a year and a half ago I did a stint as an independent contractor with an operation called "ChaCha." It's one of those services where you text your question, and someone answers it. Anything from "what year was the War of 1812" to "what's the best Chinese restaurant in Peoria Illinois." Stuff that you could google pretty quickly and come up with an answer. I was called a "guide," and had to pass an online test to get the position.
It paid pretty well - 10 cents per answer, and after a little time it got so I could easily do 60-80 answers per hour. (You wouldn't believe how many were just questions like "are you a real person," where you could just cut and paste, hit the button, and get the next question.) They would offer bonuses during "high-traffic" times. On weekends, when the questions came one after another with no waiting, it could be pretty lucrative. There were other times (early mornings) I would log on and wait minutes at a time for the "doorbell" noise to ring with a question.
They changed the pay structure, I want to say back in January 2009, so that the "easy" questions were paying a lot less. If you were good at math questions, science questions, etc., those still paid pretty well. But at that point it was no longer worth my while to continue. I don't know what they're paying now, or even whether the entry process is the same. It worked great for me at the time because I was working from home and had downtime where I needed to be available online anyway.
If someone were looking for a little bit of extra cash and was going to be sitting in front of the computer anyway, this would be worth a shot. But I don't think the income produced would ever be significant.
