Scam Warning: Contenta

It's Two Scam ... Two Scam ... Wednesday? Shit, I should have waited until tomorrow to do this.

Anyway, as this and the previous post indicate, something can be a "scam" without actively being fraudulent or stealing your money (at least sez me, and it's my blog). The last post was time theft, this one is just a crappy overpromising business plan that looks like it is going to waste a lot of your money.

Contenta violates the first rule of looking for work ... DON'T PAY TO LOOK FOR WORK.

It's ostensibly a "curated job board" that specializes in listing high-paying jobs for freelance content writers. There are a whole lot of problems with this model:

• There are lots of other free and lower-cost resources that do this exact same thing

• People working in this tier of content writing already know who to pitch and where the jobs are already. The listings are hardly A Secret To Everyone

• No company has a business interest in having exclusive listings with Contenta, so they can't possibly be giving you something you can't get somewhere else

So, this could be a legitimate business model purely as a convenience service, IF it's vacuuming up jobs from so many different sources that it truly is a time-saver as opposed to checking various job boards (and if checking job boards is even your MO to begin with - I've been making it just fine rarely-to-never checking any job aggregators).

So let's see what the price is ... hmm ... they don't mention anywhere on their site that they charge a fee, let alone what it is. This older Reddit thread indicates its ... holy shit, $234 for six months? That's almost $40 a month! That's roughly a home internet bill! That's way more than a gym membership! This newer review indicates it may be even more expensive, closer to $50 a month, and you have to commit for a year and pay $99 per month in the first six months. Jesus. (Also, that second linked review is positive ... but note the referral link at the bottom)

In an attempt to add value, they seem to have some sort of "training program", but I have a suspicion it's a means to generate free content for their blog.

Oh, and at least one review indicates that they categorize jobs that pay 7 to 10 cents per word among the "highest" paying. That's around minimum wage for a competent content writer in most circumstances. The review also indicates they accept job listings that are as low as 1 cent per word. If you have to wade through all that shit, are you really even saving time? And who the heck is paying $50 a month to get leads on 1-cent-per-word jobs?

All this plus the fact that they market through an affiliate program (and the positive reviews you can Google for all have referral links) throws up a whole lotta red flags. I'd love to hear more about what the "training program" actually does if anyone out there has sprung for it.