I tried MTurk as well out of curiosity. I only made a few dollars before giving up, but my observation was that like anything else in life, you get what you pay

I tried MTurk as well out of curiosity. I only made a few dollars before giving up, but my observation was that like anything else in life, you get what you pay for. High paying jobs on MTurk require a impeccable record of a high number of accepted jobs and a near perfect acceptance ratio. You slowly (I can't emphasize how slow this is) build up your reputation as you complete jobs for pennies until you get to the category where you can accept jobs that pay $100 dollars or more. Turkers who work hard to get the reputation to do high paying jobs won't risk losing the reputation by cheating. So if you want good results you need to pay up to get those Turkers on your job.