URL: textbroker.com
NATURE OF WORK AND PAYMENT
Textbroker acts as a standardizing middleman between clients looking for written content (mostly articles and blog posts, but there are product descriptions, Wiki pages and press releases as well) and writers.
Authors are almost never credited; in fact, anonymity between author and client is strongly emphasized, with each only seeing each other on the site as a User ID number. Authors have a profile they can fill out with their qualifications, however, and can share more personal information there if they care to. Clients almost always will publish the articles under their own names or under no name, however, and you generally aren't told where it's being published.
Pay is per word. There is a general pool of articles open to everybody (filtered by rank), and pay for these is set by Textbroker at a standard rate determined by your rank. The ranking system ranges from 1 to 5 stars. 3-star authors make 1 cent per word, 4-star authors make 1.4 cents, and 5-star authors make 5 cents per word.
The general pool of articles is not the only option for making money, however. If clients are impressed by an author's profile and/or previous work for them, they may place "direct order" requests for that author. The author is free to determine their "direct order" price, though I've found once you get much above 2 cents per word you won't get much attention even if you're well-regarded. Authors can also join "teams" created by clients, which set their own price per word - these bottom out at 1.37 cents and generally range anywhere from there up to 2.5 cents. When an author reaches a 5-star level, there are "expert teams" they can join by presenting credentials showing they are an expert in a particular field. Expert Team articles are the most lucrative, at a whopping 20 cents per word.
Textbroker requires a Paypal account to receive payment. You can request your account balance be cashed out at any time, but requests aren't processed until Friday, with payment usually showing up in your Paypal the following Monday (unless you requested cashout on Friday, in which case you'll usually have to wait another week.)
SITE HISTORY / LEGITIMACY
Though Textbroker has its share of issues, paying properly and on time is not one of them. No issues whatsoever thus far with payment on time after working off and on there for two years. They're based in the United States (Las Vegas), and more details are available at their Crunchbase profile.
INTERNATIONAL ACCESS
Textbroker is available outside the U.S. (and in fact many of its clients who request work are in Europe and Australia and looking for content for their local markets), but Paypal is the only payment option.
STARTING OUT
At one point, Textbroker was requiring that new authors (in the U.S.) scan and email their driver's license. I actually signed up back in 2009, but didn't end up writing anything until June of this year; I don't recall having to send them any documentation back then. I've seen conflicting reports on forums of them still doing this at present. Be aware it may be a possibility. I totally understand hesitation about it, but I've found the company to be rock solid so far.
Once you pass $200 in earnings, you'll have to submit a Form W9 (which has your social security number) in order to release your funds; you can continue working up to earnings of $600 until they receive it, but your account will be frozen at $600 completely until they get the W9 apparently. I mailed mine in shortly after hitting $200 in earnings and they processed it only 2 days later.
First things first, though; before taking on any writing jobs, you'll take a test (writing a short sample article on a topic they choose) to determine your starting placement in the rankings system. I believe 4 is the highest you can start out at, as there's a proofreading test you have to take to be promoted to Level 5 once you're in the system. Most people will find themselves starting at Level 3, however, even if you're a very good writer.
And this is a wall that a lot of people don't get past. There's really very little work at Level 3, and a lot of people competing for it. You really need to be able to log in throughout the day on weekdays to snag assignments that you can handle, but even if you have the luxury of lots of free time on your side, you can still expect this to take weeks to happen.
Things open up quite a bit once you reach Level 4, however. There's consistently a lot more work, and it's of higher quality (from less dodgy and SEO spammy requesters.) Level 4 also makes you eligible to start joining Teams, which create a secondary stream of work outside of the general article pool. Even at level 4, I wouldn't count on finding more than 2 or 3 articles to write per day, and that's if you have the luxury of logging it at various times throughout the day to check listings. But with Team participation and building relationships with regular requesters who like your work (and will send you Direct Orders), at this point Textbroker can become a viable source of income to the tune of multiple hundreds of dollars per month.
PROBLEMS WITH TEXTBROKER
The Level 3 Wall is the most glaring problem, though to be fair it's also not something that's entirely on Textbroker's end.
I'm conflicted on Textbroker's editorial review process. On the one hand, I like that it uses an objective, knowable standard - basic English grammar, punctuation, spelling and AP Style - with the editors not attempting to evaluate relevance or quality on topics they know little to nothing about. On the OTHER hand, they can seemingly be incredibly nitpicky about things that the clients don't actually care about. I had a hard time breaking out of Level 3 solely due to one or two superfluous commas in a number of articles that clients otherwise loved.
I also don't understand the rationale behind insistence on AP Style in every article; most articles are not news articles and I've never seen a client specifically request it. You also get the conundrum of clients giving glowing 5-star reviews and specifically requesting you for more work, but Textbroker jumping in with 3-star reviews due to very minor punctuation issues and potentially knocking your ranking down to where those clients no longer have access to you! It's just a somewhat strange way to do business to me, and I wonder if it isn't a mechanism to control how many people are 4- or 5-star authors without letting people know there's a hard limit on how many authors can be in those rankings at a time. That's just a suspicion, I'm not accusing anyone of anything.
FINAL VERDICT: SOME POTENTIAL
Textbroker's rate of pay is at the absolute bottom of the industry for college-educated, native English-speaking professional writers. That said, they do almost always seem to have tons of work available, and most clients are not picky. Meaning that if you're desperate or have nothing else whatsoever going on, you can knock out work at a rate of at least minimum wage per hour, if not up to $10-12 or so with some of the better-paying stuff.
My big recommendations for this site are to keep an AP Style Guide at hand to refer to if you're unsure about anything while in the early going, and to also stick to short and small jobs exclusively (no more than 500-600 words or so). Textbroker seems to always take the side of clients, and I personally quit them permanently after they decided to back a troublesome client who was clearly in the wrong to the hilt. Don't sink too much time into any one piece here, and try to focus on joining teams / writer pools that are easy to work with.
I strongly suspect that you're correct about a limit to the number of writers they can have at any level. This is the only logical reason I can think of for them to demote an otherwise good writer over some ridiculous comma misplacement and the like. Writers are not editors, and they're bound to make some mistakes over time. It becomes cost-ineffective for writers to spend even a quarter as much time editing as it did for them to research and complete an article. Just the research alone is often cost-ineffective. I agree that having an AP style guide is probably almost mandatory, but it's an investment that is not going to pay off unless someone plans to write there quite a bit. Other writing venues are not as hell-bent on AP style unless they're academic.
ReplyDeleteThat they have tons of work available is not such an advantage when you consider the type of work they have available. I don't even consider most of their orders article writing, except in the loosest of the term. The best analogy I can think of to describe it would be to ask an artist to paint a picture and then give him a paint-by-number to complete. As much as people seem to recommend teams (mostly because they pay slightly more) the team orders are replete with this "paint-by-number" approach. If that kind of writing is something someone is happy doing, I guess it will work for the person. I'll admit that I don't read their forums on a regular basis but whenever I have, I seem to notice the same group of regulars commenting. They seem to me to be the type that would welcome this kind of over-structure to what they have to put together for an end product. In my opinion, this is the only type that can really thrive there for any length of time.