Greetings dear readers!
First, I apologize for the delayed timing of this continued review. I’ve had some kind of lingering illness and malaise for the past week or so. I will generously and unfairly blame my writing partner here at this blog, since I started getting sick after a night of booze and heated intellectual discussion with him. I am back to feeling mostly normal again and I’ve finally worked up a video to further discuss my experience at Crowdsource and share some of the do’s and don’ts I’ve learned the hard way so far.
*WARNING* The video above is a bit long and a bit rambling, but there are several different aspects of the Crowdsource experience I thought you all would like to hear about and I did a bit of improvising as far as the structure. I’ll go over the main points here in a somewhat more logical way, if you prefer some silly logic over off-the-cuff rambling.
Check Out the Forum
You’ll find the forums for current and prospective workers at http://forum.crowdsource.com . You can find a lot of helpful information on the forums pertaining to specific tasks or specific issues that people are commonly encountering. You can also find a bit of off-putting discussion about the many issues workers have with the current tiered system. I have to admit that if I had viewed the forums before joining the site, I might not have bothered with it. What you need to keep in mind, however, is that the forum is mostly composed of the most serious workers who take their writer level and their tasks very seriously. These writers are not only venting, but also trying to offer constructive criticisms for what is, apparently, quite a new system of leveling and tiered work. But, as I said, in addition to all of this meta discussion there is a lot of helpful info and advice about the specific tasks and AP style preferences and the like. Speaking of AP style and the tiered system takes us to the next section of discussion.
Pass/Fail Trials and Tribulations
So, if you remember in my first video I breezed right on through a large chunk of questions in a greedy grab for bonuses and payouts. Well, dear readers, don’t make this mistake. The site is pretty stringent when it comes to properly following AP style and the specific task Style Guides. Go ahead and do a few tasks at first, then wait for your feedback to see if there are any mistakes you are making throughout. You need to get used to the preferred style and tone of the answers before you go diving off the deep end, like I did. My numbers very nearly dropped to below the required 60% pass rate required to continue writing because of mostly small mistakes that I could have avoided by doing a few test runs first. The good news is that you still get paid for questions you fail!
You might be thinking, as I did, “What? They pay me for sucking?!” Well, yes. I think this is one of the more confusing aspects of the tiered system as it stands. Currently, if your work requires few edits then you pass and your passes count towards advancing through the levels. If you fail, you get paid but you fall down the ladder towards potentially not being able to write any further answers. Of course, this system is set up to weed out those who are doing shoddy work consistently and have no business writing for the site. In my opinion, however, I think there should be three levels instead. If you do horribly, plagiarize, write a bunch of nonsense, and the work is unusable without substantial edits then you should fail without pay. If your work can still be used but requires a fair number of edits and corrections, you should pass but should not advance towards higher level jobs. If you do very well, your answer requires little edits and follows the rules with precision and style then you should be advanced towards the higher levels. Now, as I mentioned above, this system is fairly new and they are still trying to work out the kinks and get it to a level that the good writers are satisfied with so we’ll just have to stay tuned on this issue. For now, keep in mind that to advance AND to keep writing at all, you need to be very cautious with your writing.
Where the Money At?
I was actually pleasantly surprised with the payout structure of the site. The waiting game starts after you submit your answers and must wait for an editor to come along and review your work. The 100-word answers seem to take quite a long time to get reviewed most of the time. I still have several from the first few days that have not been reviewed yet. From what I understand, this stems from the fact that many of the new or inexperienced users are answering these questions and the editors hate having to go through and heavily edit these. Despite this fact, the large majority of my tasks have been approved in a pretty timely manner. Once your work is reviewed, you will see the amount earned in the “Owed” column. The day after your work is reviewed, Crowdsource will transfer the money right into your Paypal account. *(I assume this is the same if you are working through MTurk or another platform, but I can’t be positive since I’m hooked up only through my Paypal account.) This means that fairly regularly your work will be reviewed and your pay will be in your Paypal account within a few days, not bad! So far I’ve made over $100 which is about 1/3 of my total MTurk earnings over a much larger period of time.
Support Me
Another important aspect of the platform that I did not discuss in the first video if the Support system. If you have any questions or concerns you can go to http://support.crowdsource.com/support/home and file a new support ticket. Now, for both the support site and the forum site, you will have to create an account. Just use the same info you used to create your main account. I’m guessing it is set up this way because of the various platforms that can be used to access the actual work, necessitating separate accounts for CrowdSource specific services. Anyway, once you get set up filing a new ticket and checking on it is pretty intuitive. You’ll get an email whenever a CSR has responded so you don’t have to keep watching the site. You will get to see a friendly face and name with your response, so it feels quite personable and not like some kind of auto-generated response. If you encounter some fails you feel are unjustified for one reason or another, make sure to file a ticket to not only try to get it overturned, but also to make the employees aware of potentially unfair editors/the potential unfairness of the system as it currently stands.
I think that’s pretty much about it for now. If you have any other questions you want answered before diving in, make sure to leave a comment and let me know! Also, if you know of similar sites I would LOVE to know about them! I’m having a hard time going back to the MTurk grind after the higher pay and entertainment value of CrowdSource, so I would love to know about some other simple freelance writing sites that do not involve bidding on projects and the like. If you know of any other sites for earning a little extra cash, writing based or not, let me know and I’ll have a look and try to do a review of them!
Cheers,
KHM
Felicitous Freelancing 