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authorr.com – the saga concludes?
I’d been neglecting to write an update on authorr.com for a while. They actually made some good changes to the site, so the payment you were getting was actually fair, and such.
But then they stopped accepting new applications, so I thought there wasn’t much of a reason to do an update. After all, if nobody can sign-up for the site, there’s really no reason to tell people the benefits of signing up for it.
A few months later, I actually tried signing in, to see for myself how the website was doing, only to be greeted by a blank page. I rolled my eyes and gave up.
Out of curiosity, I tried visiting the site today, and… it possibly no longer exists? Unlike the blank page I was getting several months ago, now I’m getting a straight up “page not found” error message. authorr.com’s Twitter account offers no help, as it consists of a single Tweet from last July telling people they’re accepting new writers. It provides a link to a page giving me the same “server not found” message. One old email I have from them recommends I follow the company’s facebook page. A visit today tells me “Sorry, this page isn’t available.” Incidentally, the last email I have from authorr.com is from December 1 2014. It just tells me there’s assignments available. There’s no email after that that says the site is closing and I should cashout or something (not that I had any money accumulated on there anyway)
So, what happened? Did the company shut down? Too many people dissatisfied with the difficulty of writing (long, weird, hard-to-write topics; unhelpful/ridiculous feedback) for such little pay (I don’t know what the pay was up before the stie went down, but at one point it was 1 cent for every 2 words for a 400-word article, so you’d get $2 for spending 30 minutes to an hour writing something that MIGHT be accepted)? Too many people saying they were getting rejected for dumb reasons? I have noticed in my extensive search over the years to find ANYTHING on this website, that most people had a negative opinion of the site. You can look on the comments here, for one, but most if not all of the comments on the small number of other blogs reviewing authorr.com had only negative things to say.
According to this website, the server at authorr.com has been deleted since February of this year. So, the question now becomes: did the entire company shut down for reasons that companies often shut down for (considering that even now, in June 2015, there are barely any posts on the internet talking about it, I’d guess it was just too unpopular to survive), or did it move to another server and url because there are more negative reviews of the site than there are positive ones? Perhaps we’ll never know.
In conclusion, I have to say I think it’s hilarious that I somehow became the authority on authorr.com. I’ve never become the authority on anything. Even this blog suggested me for having “the best info on the site” (although there’s a typo in the text, it does actually link to here)
I would also like to thank everyone for commenting on the previous posts (in particular, Part 2 – which is the 4th result on Google when you search for “authorr.com”; my authorr.com tag page is the THIRD result on Google right now), for sharing your own experiences and opinions. It seems in the end it may have been useless, now that the site appears to no longer exist at all, but I’m sure it was helpful for other people while the site was still up and accepting new members.
In my experience, these “get paid to write” sites are pretty much impossible. You can’t make a living off them unless you’re crazy talented so you can make a huge amount of high-quality posts in a short time. Even if you’re just looking for some extra income, they’re pretty useless, I think. I’ve been a member of another website (which is actually reputable and widely-known) for about 6 years, and in my first two months when I was actively writing, I didn’t even make $1 (to be fair, the payscale on that website is absolute crap unless you produce a huge amount of articles on really popular subjects; you make like 1 cent for every 10 pageviews or something).
Meanwhile I’ve earned over $800 on instagc without having to write anything! I’ve also been meaning to do an update for instagc because they actually added things, like a direct deposit cashout option (and Paypal is being added soon), as well as a new video wall, which I leave open in Internet Explorer on mute while I browse in Firefox. You still won’t get rich in instagc unless you’re CRAZY dedicated (even then, you should only get about enough money as if you were working in a part-time job at minimum wage; although if you have a huge legion of dedicated referrals you actually CAN get a really decent amount of money), but I can confirm you CAN actually make money from the site. Mostly I just watch videos on there now (in the instagc Video wall and the Adbistro wall) and I make around $17 every week just from watching videos (and I’d make more but I usually can’t just hang out on my computer all day over the weekend). Much better than the $0 I made from authorr.com, not to mention it’s way easier and you don’t have to pass a test or anything to be accepted. There’s still a bit of a learning curve, I think, but the best way to learn how to get around is to just poke around yourself, see what’s trending in the Ticker, and see if anyone in the chatbox has anything helpful to say (I don’t pay much attentiont o the chatbox, but they are usually talking about random things, but sometimes they’ll recommend an offer or say “Don’t do this offer, it’ll install adware” or something).
One way you can consider to try to make money from your writing – start a blog, and once you have enough followers, start up a Patreon. Patreon is a website a bit like those crowdfunding sites (Kickstarter, etc), except there’s no goal and product people are trying to fund. People can just pledge money for you, either per work or per a time period. They can pledge however much money they want. And then you can have goals and rewards, so for instance anyone who donates $30 a month to you can choose a topic for you to write about, or if your total donations for the month add up to $400 then you’ll post an old report you wrote back in 3rd grade about Russia, or something. I don’t know how profitable Patreon is for bloggers, but I have seen people make a really decent amount of money from donations on Patreon. There’s one artist who gets $25,000 every two weeks from pledges from fans. I mean, geez.
P.S. – If you know of any websites out there of the “do stuff to make money” variety, talk about them in the comments! Anything you’ve tried only for it to be one of those “write 800 words and get paid $0.50” sites, or “it’s easy to sign up, but they never have any jobs available for you to do”, or even, “I like this, it’s pretty easy to do stuff on here and the pay is pretty fair for the amount of work.” If you’d got anything you’d like me to check out and review, go ahead and suggest that!
I guess that’s it for now. Thanks for reading! I may get encouraged soon to finish a “tries… Japanese Kit Kats” post I’ve had just sitting around for a long time.
Authorr.com Part 2
So apparently my sample assignment was rejected. For some reason this isn’t mentioned anywhere on my account profile, like say in the “failed” section, or perhaps under the “Status” marker. That would make too much sense.
The rejection email just says “sorry you failed, but you can try out for other assignment types!” It doesn’t give you any sort of feedback as to what you did you wrong, so even if you try the other assignment types, you might end up making the same mistakes and you’ll keep failing the other assignments.
You can’t apply to the other assignments anyway because none of them are hiring. Well, you can “opt-in” for them (at least, I was able to for the Value Article assignment), but that doesn’t mean you can actually get work in them.
So, thank you very much for making me waste at least an hour of my time, AND charging me money for the honor of not being able to work for you.
My advice from the last article still stands – no one on the entire internet seems to be mentioning this website except in job descriptions posted BY the website. It’s nearly impossible to search for authorr.com, by the way, because Google assumes you’ve misspelled something and you mean author or authors. I did a search excluding those words and most of results are people who actually meant “author” but misspelled it “authorr”.
So anyway there’s no real evidence that this site is legit. No one but me seems to be aware it exists, the company’s facebook page is actually one guy’s personal profile, there’s no customer reviews or evidence of past business dealings, samples of the sorts of things they provide to clients and expect from their writers, etc. Scamadviser.com is the only website I’ve seen mentioning authorr.com that wasn’t just saying “…is now hiring!” Scamadviser.com gives the site a trust rating of 73% safe, mostly because the real location of the website is hidden (although the job listings for the site say the company is based in Nevada; the company that owns the web domain is apparently based in Panama).
My advice remains the same as last time: Skip it. There’s plenty of other freelance writing websites out there that have proof that it’s not a scam, AND don’t charge you for signing up.
But once again, if I find out more about the site, I will update my judgment accordingly.
Edit: The site refunded the one cent it charged me to sign up/confirm I was a real person. I have no idea if that’s just how they roll, or if I got the refund because I failed the test? I mean it’s only one cent, but it’s still the principle of the thing.
Savvy tries… Authorr.com
In my quest to find a job I can actually do with my disability, I found a Craigslist ad for “freelance writers.” I was wary as I always am when these kinds of jobs come up, because usually they either pay you almost nothing for a lot of work, or you get no work at all.
And unfortunately, it seems the website in question that is hosting these freelance writer jobs (authorr.com) is not well-known. I Googled it, and all I got were TOS and FAQ links from authorr.com itself, and a lot of links on being an author. So not helpful.
I decided to give it a shot, though, because the pay rate is pretty good – for a Press Release, you can get paid a maximum of $0.06 per word, which doesn’t sound like much, until you realize each press release has to be at least 400 words long, which by my calculations seems to mean you can earn a maximum of $24 per post. Which isn’t huge, but is better than nothing.
Signing up was pretty easy. They need your info to tell that you’re a real person who is employable and that you don’t have a second account. They also need PayPal or bank information, again to see if you’re a real person, and to verify you have a real account because they pay you directly into PayPal or whatever. The site also charges a $0.01 signup fee, again to see if you’re a real person. The charge is not reversible.
After you’re signed up, you have to submit a sample piece for whichever assignment type you’ve been hired for (options are Premium Article, Value Article, eCommerce Product Description, and Press Release.). The site will give you the basics on what sort of information your sample should include. They’re just looking to make sure you can write in English without sounding like a monkey, and that you can write for whatever assignment type reasonably well.
It was reasonably easy to write my assignment (a press release for a company’s new product). You just talk about the features, the price, explain a bit about it, include company contact information, all without using “I” or “you”. The hardest part was I was about 150 words too short (it HAS to be 400 words long at least), so I had to fluff up the piece with more information when I’d already said basically everything.
Once that’s done, you click “submit” and wait a few days for the higher-ups at authorr.com to review your sample and grade it. If you do poorly, I think they make you redo it.
This is where I can no longer be helpful, though. My sample read as “awaiting approval” for several days, and now it says “completed.” I have no idea if I’m supposed to still be waiting for feedback, or if it was good enough that there’s no need for feedback. And I have no assignments waiting in my queue. Does that mean there’s simply no available assignments on the website? Or am I still waiting around to be fully approved to start participating?
The FAQ section says some authors will be expected to be able to write “dozens and dozens of pieces per week”. It seems it’s the case where the better you write, the more jobs you get, so when you’re just starting out you get no jobs at all, so you can’t prove you’re a good writer, so you continue to not get jobs.
The FAQ is somewhat informative, but you can’t find it from your account page for some reason. I also find it very suspicious that the website seems to be presenting itself as a place where you can write tons of articles if you’re good enough, but no one seems to be mentioning the site anywhere on the internet.
Additionally, the site has links to a Facebook and Twitter page, which you’d assume would be the company pages. The Twitter account is suspended, so I don’t know about that, and the Facebook link goes to one individual’s page. I’m assuming he’s the owner of authorr.com, but that is very odd and most unprofessional to have a company website link to your personal Facebook page without indicating why.
I have a suspicion the website may be something of a scam – say Company X pays $30 to get a press release written. So the website puts out ads that it’s looking for new, freelance writers. Hopeful writer signs up, pays a 1 cent fee (which is small enough that they don’t mind they’re having to pay money to get a job), writes a sample as per the site’s instructions, and waits around forever to get an actual job. Meanwhile, website takes the writing sample and gives it to Company X. Company X is pleased, and the website has made a $30.01 profit.
I mean I have no proof of any of this, and the press release I wrote was for a product that did not appear to come out all that recently, so don’t take that last paragraph as fact.
Long story short, authorr.com is enticing with its potentially decent payout, but a lack of ANYONE on the internet even mentioning the site, no customer endorsements, and me sitting in work limbo, I would not recommend this site to anyone at this time. There are other freelance writing websites out there that, even if they don’t pay as well, at least have proof that people are using the site and getting paid.
If I need to, I will follow-up this post with an update.
Savvy Tries 