CrowdSource Review

(IMPORTANT UPDATE: As of 11/17/2015, CrowdSource has rebranded as OneSpace. As of this writing the details of this review appear to continue to be applicable, however. If significant changes occur, I'll make a note here and do a separate review of the company as OneSpace.)



CrowdSource

URL: crowdsource.com

NATURE OF WORK AND PAYMENT

Users of Mechanical Turk may recognize CrowdSource as one of the few regular requesters that offers pay significantly above the chump change you normally make there. But they also only hire in unpredictable cycles, and don't approve new workers if they aren't currently hiring.

Turk isn't necessary to work for them, as you can also work directly through their website with either a Paypal or Updesk login. You can access all that (and see if they're currently taking in new workers) at this link.

They have a number of simple "clickwork" tasks for low pay (mostly search engine categorization comparable to the rest of the simple stuff on MTurk), but the bulk of their work is for writers. As of this writing they have one regular ongoing client, Ask.com, and the majority of the writing work is in answering questions of 100 or 200 words for that site. You can see an example of this type of question here, as well as in the embarassing screenshots I've collected over the last year peppered throughout this review.

They also previously had an ongoing relationship with Overstock.com to write short product descriptions, but I'm not sure if that's still in place as I haven't seen that work in some time.

Payment is either through MTurk or through Paypal and usually comes within 1-3 days of completing each task. There is no lump payment, you get lots of small but fast payments from them.

SITE HISTORY / LEGITIMACY

I've personally worked for CrowdSource for a little over a year now and have had no issues with slow payment or attempted fraud. Getting screwed out of pay for completed work due to poor editing is a possibility, but is a seperate issue addressed in more detail below. Aside from editing issues on the writing tasks, the company is about as reliable and legitimate as it gets -- really their greatest strength.

You get an email address through which you can directly contact the senior editing staff. I've found them to be good about responding in a timely manner, even if not all issues get resolved to satisfaction.

INTERNATIONAL ACCESS

I'm still unclear if they accept international workers. They don't have a definitive statement on their site.  If you make enough money and are a U.S. citizen, however, you'll have to provide a social security number for tax purposes. The bulk of the work is in writing, and given their editing, ESL writers are not likely to survive even if they get through somehow.



STARTING OUT

After being accepted, you'll need to test for various qualifications in order to work on the different task types. These are generally just multiple-choice tests, but writing samples may be needed for the more advanced writing tasks.

As per usual with content mills, they have a tier system for writers. The lowest amount you can make is $2 per 100-word answer or $5 per 200-word answer. At the highest tier you make $3 per 100-word answer and $6 per 200-word answer.

PROBLEMS WITH CROWDSOURCE

In a word: editing. It can be maddeningly awful. CrowdSource would be a dream freelancing gig simply if the editing wasn't so capricious.

CrowdSource has two layers of editing -- a small staff of senior editors, and a much larger squad of MTurk randoms who managed to Google their way through a multiple-choice quiz. The latter take the first pass at your work, and they have entirely too much power over how much money you make and whether or not you get paid for how frequently incompetent they are.

Prior to a few months ago, the Turk randoms could reject your work out of hand without pay. They recently instituted a "rework" system where an "editor" can send the question back to you for one revision, but this has really just made things worse as the Turk incompetents frequently return your work for nonsense reasons or with no helpful comments whatsoever.

The QA on the creation and editing of questions also needs some work. It's actually improved somewhat over the last year, but when you combine it with the already-Byzantine-and-ever-growing/shifting style guide, many questions come through that are simply unanswerable based on their wording and on CrowdSource's internal rules and limitations regarding things like sources cited.




FINAL VERDICT - Some Potential

The "peer editing" system means that even if you turn in a perfectly fine piece, there's still no guarantee you'll ever actually get paid for it. When the editing is competent, you can easily clear over $20/hr (when they have work, and there can be droughts of weeks at a time). They go through these frequent jags of approving crappy low-level editors who they give carte blanche to, however, and you can easily find your income halved and your tier ranking trashed if one of these idiots grabs the bulk of your work.

(And in case you think it's a case of personal sour grapes ... check out WAHM and GlassDoor  for further evidence that poor editing is a serious problem here.)

The "first-come first-served" style is also an issue, given that they'll have plenty of work for a few days then have nothing at all for potentially 2 to 3 weeks. So it's not at all a reliable source of income. 100-200 word pieces also have to be completed within two hours of accepting them.

When the editing is good, I've found it to be good for a few hundred dollars a month many months. But a particularly terrible rash of editing since the "rework" system debuted has caused me to move CrowdSource to the bottom of my list. If I'm utterly desperate for work, and even Textbroker doesn't have anything halfway appealing on hand, I might visit again. But until then ...

Maybe keep it in your egg basket in case the editing improves again ... but keep it far to the back and don't count on it for anything .