Clickworker Review

URL: clickworker.com

NATURE OF WORK AND PAYMENT

Clickworker is a bit like Amazon Mechanical Turk and Mobileworks. Workers complete mostly small, short tasks for small pay. Thus far, the main bulk of work available on the site (that I've seen) seems to be UHRS tasks (a lot of different small tasks mostly related to search engine categorization - a bit like what Leapforce and Lionbridge do but on a smaller and simpler scale apparently - read more about it  here, but they also advertise SEO and content writing, internet research and photo tagging.

Paypal is required for payment if you're in the United States. I'm not sure what options (if any) are available in other countries.



SITE HISTORY / LEGITIMACY

Clickworker was founded in 2005 and is fairly public with all of their contact information. They just received 1.25 million in venture funding this past summer apparently. They appear to be totally legitimate, I am having a hard time finding anyone on the common work-at-home forums complaining about nonpayment or any other shenanigans.

INTERNATIONAL ACCESS

 If you are in Europe and in a SEPA area, you can get payments directly to your bank account. The rest of the world has to use Paypal, though there appear to be no other geographical restrictions.

STARTING OUT

 If you're in the U.S., Clickworker does immediately require a social security number (in lieu of filling out a W-9) as well as a valid Paypal address for payment.

Where Clickworker differs from Mechanical Turk is that it's much, much more qualification-happy. There's usually a separate qualification test for every single task type. Initially, you can only qualify for basic writing jobs by taking two English grammar tests, and for address research jobs (pay close attention to the instructions here as you're required to convert U.S. phone numbers to the European format.) After these are completed, you'll be able to take two more assessments to open up the UHRS tasks. Though I did fairly well on all these assessments, after 3 weeks on the site no further assessments have opened up, so you seem to be limited to UHRS, address research and the occasional SEO writing job for a bit more than 1 cent per word initially.


PROBLEMS WITH CLICKWORKER

Clickworker does seem to have a solid amount of regular work available, though all that I've found available to me is also very low-paying. They're basically competing with Mechanical Turk in the microwork market, but I've found the finickyness of the site combined with the uninspiring pay makes me prefer to just continue spending my time with the Turk.

 The site is based in Germany and uh ... how shall I put this politely ... it's rather stereotypically German. Tons of anal and finicky requirements about everything, some of which don't really make much sense. Particularly as relates to the UHRS tasks, which appear to be the vast bulk of the available work. Aside from requiring a separate qualification test for every single individual type of task, Clickworker forces you to use ONLY Internet Explorer for some reason, and also generates a random Microsoft Live login (separate from your regular site login) that is required to access them. So that's another U/P you have to keep track of, and the username is some long garbled email address that you can't change.

 I had some serious problems with questions on their qualification tests as well. Some answers are outright wrong, and there's no way to flag or challenge them. And some are just bizarre, this one being my favorite:

You can avoid the UHRS tasks, but there's very little else to do except for SEO writing tasks that only pay about a penny per word.

FINAL VERDICT - SOME POTENTIAL

 I checked Clickworker out because I heard stories on various forums about people regularly pulling down $9/10 an hour with them and that it was becoming more viable than Mechanical Turk. After investigating the site I have no idea how they're doing it, and I'd much rather put in the Turk time. If there's some sort of secret formula to working Clickworker I'd love to hear it, but until I find out what it is I have to pass on it.I'll give it the "some potential" ranking though, as they do actually have a bunch of work available.