A few years back, Amazon launched a crowdsourcing platform that has taken off. Crowdsourcing is when you get a bunch of people together (usually through the net) to break a job down into small parts to work on, or when you're trying to get answers to a question, survey, or experiment quickly.
This platform is called Mechanical Turk.
There are a bunch of different jobs on MTURK. Some of them involve transcribing audio, others relate to letting websites test features. By far the most consistent (and trustworthy entrance point to Mechanical Turk jobs) is the constant stream of University studies. These MTURK college studies are usually from professors doing research in economics, psychology, philosophy, sociology, and other experiments in the social sciences, market research, and business areas. Such studies usually pay anywhere from 10 cents to 2 or 3 bucks a pop.
Because of the open nature of the platform, there's almost a "fend for yourself" mentality regarding scammers and shady jobs. However, you can combat this by joining a community forum and downloading a tool or two.
One useful tool is Turkopticon, which allows users to rate job requesters on various dimensions (fairness, prompt payment, etc.) and leave comments, helping to build a reputation based system you van use to decide if you want to go for a job.
Some forums I follow for leads on good jobs make it much easier. They tend to have a threshold of about 10 cents per minute of work for an experienced hand, so they tend to sniff out the best jobs. Turkernation is worth checking out. If you're a Reddit.com user, it's worth checking out /r/mturk and /r/HITsWorthTurkingFor.
A lot of these forums function on the principle that the people sharing "good HITs" (Human Intelligence Tasks - Amazon's term for little jobs) is that they will use one of those ad-based URL shorteners. Like Adfocus or Adfly. They get paid $5 every 10k hits, so they earn by sharing. You should be prepared to pass through these ad-gateways, and all the risks to your browser they entail. If you get good at finding HITs of your own, you can make spare money sharing them on these forums yourself using such gateway sites.
They pay out via the Amazon Payments system. You do have to give them actual tax info, such as your SSID if you're a US American, and payouts are easiest accomplished via direct transfers to your bank account ($10 minimum at first) or Amazon Giftcard balance ($1 minimum.)
Disclosure: There's no monetary incentive for me telling you this. MTURK has no referral program. It is a site I visit regularly, usually with the assistance of some of the forums I mention. You can make a fairly good amount of money on it if you're willing to put in the effort.
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