• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, February 9, 2010

Online offers network Offerpal Media is putting users to work to earn virtual currency for playing games.

Instead of earning virtual cash by completing sponsored offers like filling out an online survey or signing up for a trial service, Offerpal is now giving users the option of doing certain tasks through a partnership with Amazon Mechanical Turk. The crowdsourcing service from Amazon provides listings for simple jobs such as rating search results, categorizing Web sites or articles, and answering questions, which people can do at their convenience.

Branded as Offerpal Tasks, the new feature is now available across the company's network of more than 2,000 Web sites and applications. The service will let online gamers choose from thousands of "human intelligence tasks," and convert their earnings into currency that can be used in online games and virtual worlds.

Users browse the online marketplace and select tasks based on the type of work, how long it will take and how much it pays. Payment is made after work is completed and approved by the entity that posted the assignment and participation is restricted to those 18 and over.

"We're proud to leverage Amazon Mechanical Turk to bring social gamers yet another alternative payment method to go along with offers, surveys, shopping, videos and all our other options, while providing developers with another way to monetize larger portions of their audience," said Offerpal CEO George Garrick in a statement.

Matt McAllister, director of marketing at Offerpal, told VentureBeat someone could make accumulate about $5 to $15 in an hour or two of doing tasks. Other types of tasks via the new service include proofreading Web content, tagging photos, moderating user-generated content, and editing content.

Amazon launched Mechanical Turk in 2005 as a marketplace for assigning tasks that computers are unable to do. As of 2010, it was still in beta, according to Wikipedia.