Metro (CNET) Review

 URL: metro.cnetcontent.com


(Update 04/11/2018: A new thread on the Reddit writing sub has emerged asserting that "Metro" is nothing more than some dude in Iran outsourcing work from Crowd Content's product description contract with Best Buy and taking the bulk of the pay for himself. Spicy! We've dispatched correspondents to the scene and will update with any breaking developments, and may update this one to SCAM WARNING status if this is verified.)

(Update 2: Well ... that escalated quickly. Over on Reddit, the guy who claimed to be a site administrator has disappeared and entirely stopped posting, and another person who created an account a day ago to pimp and defend the site not only deleted all their comments but their entire account for some reason. This isn't moving to a Scam Warning just yet as the site is still functional and does appear to be paying ... if you want to work for One Peepee Touch instead of a living wage)

Metro is a brand-new writing platform that thus far appears to specialize exclusively in product reviews (the short, descriptive blurbs that accompany product listings at store websites).

You'll find all this very familiar if you ever worked for OneSpace (aka CrowdSource several years ago) during their massive contract with Overstock.com to do all of their product reviews/listings. Metro has a smoother and slicker interface, but otherwise the core process and workflow is almost identical.

NATURE OF WORK AND PAYMENT

The only work available at the moment is in writing and editing product descriptions. You're given the product name, model number and maybe a handful of features or operational information. You're then expected to go to the either the manufacturer website or a reputable megastore retailer (like Best Buy) and use their catalog information to draft up a product review.

You get paid 5 cents per word to write and 1.5 cents to edit, with a minimum of 50 words required for each description. So each writing task will pay at least $2.50. They don't seem to want you to exceed 100 words, so $5 seems to be the upper limit for any given task.

Payment is exclusively by PayPal to verified accounts.

SITE HISTORY / LEGITIMACY

Here's where the first of the red flags for this site comes in.

There's a spirited discussion over at the freelance writing Reddit sub about whether or not Metro is a phishing scam. People are suspicious due to it coming out of nowhere, not being indexed in Google, asking for a verified PayPal address up front, and having a connection to CNet that is unclear (it's hosted on a CNet subdomain, but the company doesn't seem to actually know anything about it or mention it anywhere).

I jumped in and checked it out because a writer friend had gone first and reported that it didn't look like a scam ... at least not a phishing attempt. If they set this up just to fish for passwords, they put WAY more effort into it than is necessary. There's a slick CMS, lots of available tasks, a style guide and a whole badge and qualification system built in.

So I wouldn't worry too much about them trying to haxxxx your PayPal, but stealing your work is another possibility. We'll come back around to that one later.

INTERNATIONAL ACCESS

I saw no steps during signup that would screen out anyone with a valid, verified PayPal account (other than needing to pass a medium-difficulty English grammar test and successfully write a 200-word product description to their specs to get access to the work).

STARTING OUT

As was just mentioned, there's a multiple choice test of grammar / appropriate use of terms in English , followed by being asked to write a longer-than-usual product review in an hour. Review and approval was extremely quick; I completed all of this late on a Friday afternoon and was given access to the work within an hour.

Metro offers an initial $5 payment just for taking their product review test, and this was actually delivered on Monday evening, which is apparently their weekly payment time.

PROBLEMS WITH METRO



"Slavedrivers with unrealistic, unprofessional expectations" is the best way I can sum up Metro's problems.

All seems well until you get to the actual paying tasks. I had no problem passing the tests, but after that it's a completely different story.

You're given a mere 20 minutes to complete each task, which might seem reasonable at first for only 50 words. But you have to factor in time taken to research the product and find a good source of information on it (which isn't always available), and also making sure you hew to their incredibly fussy style guide.

Googling up a good source of product information and making sure you have the tone and style tuned precisely to their overbearing expectations can easily cause 50 words to push close to 20 minutes. Which means you're working at a $7.50-$10 per hour clip, and always at risk of some hiccup causing you to lose the last 20 minutes of work.

And after all that, your work can simply be rejected out of hand. So you really never know for certain if you're getting paid for the full amount of time you just put in.

FINAL VERDICT: NOT WORTH IT

There's so much wrong here I don't know where to start. First of all, per-task time limits that kick in as soon as you click on the assignment (which can't be previewed beforehand) are unacceptable, especially at the level of detail and voice specificity they expect you to write at.

The pay is unacceptable too. Even if you didn't have to worry about overly fussy editing yanking money out from under you at any time, their estimate of $22-35 per hour is wildly optimistic. Under the circumstances I witnessed, $10 per hour looks a whole lot more realistic, which again is a ridiculous rate for what they're expecting. Five cents per word is also lower-end pay for a professional writer, certainly not appropriate for the precision of voice they want.

And if a piece is rejected, you get no feedback whatsoever about what they felt was wrong with it. None. You're just ass out with no money, some wasted billable hours and no idea how to improve the situation in the future. I think if there is any scam going on here, it's going to wind up being them rejecting work and then using it anyway.

The overall impression I got was that this is just another virtual cotton plantation designed by the usual microwork exploiters, hoping against hope they'll find enough desperate masochists to field a viable labor force. If you're a good enough writer to pass muster here, you should have no end of other better opportunities, you don't need to put up with these odious terms or the abusive pay structure. This is the same garbage model that CrowdSource/OneSpace used to run, but with your ability to make a living put in the hands of Product Description Nazis instead of underqualified MTurk jokes.




I'll give it another look if they ever change their terms or add different types of writing tasks, but for now, this one is definitely a no-go.