Textbroker review: Why am I working there?

This hub is quite unusual to some other articles talking about how great they are as a 4 stars or 5 stars author at textbroker or how bad textbroker giving their grammatical comments or how low their pay are. It is a little story and review from a lower star author. And I have just one message. If you really want to be an author, give yourself a TRY, even though you THINK it is not quite possible at the beginning.

As a 2 stars German author

About two months ago, I came up with an idea to write in German with the wish that I could improve my German through writing. I have no idea about the business of content writing. By accident, I got to know the name of textbroker through a job hunting website. Although my German is my second language (my level is about intermediate), I gave myself a try. I registered and submitted one short text (about 250 words) in German. After one day, I was accepted as a two stars author (the lowest level). I was very excited to check what kind of jobs are there at their database.

My assignments

I updated my profile and started to write my first article about buying cars. It was a SEO type of article. I was required to write an article about a car model with a style that is different from what they already have on their website. The client gave me a very good ratings afterwards. I could only manage to write one article about 300 words per day, which brings me about 2 euro. Yes, it is very little. I treat it as a driving force to improve my writing. Textbroker will scan every article to check any copied content before submitting to clients. After submitting my article, I was a bit excited to check my emails from time to time to see whether I need to rewrite them or not.

And there is a type of article that I really have difficulties to finish it - Spintags articles. Authors need to write a basic text first and then provide different variation of words in the same sentence for the whole text. For example, Mimi is a {black|white|grey} {ugly|beautiful|poor} {dog|cat|bear}. And you have to do the same at every sentence of the whole article. It is not my kind of jobs.

As a 3 stars English author

As I learnt English from kindergarten already, I am confident in my English in broad sense. I registered at their UK website (I am not a US citizen, I can only register at UK one). I was successfully assigned to be a 3 stars author. I hoped to get more jobs and money from English database. I was/ am disappointed as there are not so many jobs for writers at 3 stars or lower. Sometimes I cannot get one job for a whole day. At the moment of writing this hub, there is NO ENGLISH JOBS for me. Sometimes I was quite happy to take a 500 words job for earning 4,5 euro and if I was lucky and fast enough, I could catch a job requiring 1500 words and earned nearly 10 euro. But it happened not so often so far.

I summarized some pros and cons of working at Textbroker.

Pros:

1. Fast and free sign up. You register for free and submit your sample text. They rate your text within a day or two, then you can activate your full account and start to write according to your assigned level.
2. Wide assignment choices. Even as a lowest level German writer, there are a lot of job choices. But for writers registered at UK website, there are more jobs for authors with at least 4 stars. (I don't know if there are more jobs for 3 stars author at their US site, if you are one of them, please share!)
3. They gave you feedback/ ratings. After your client accepted your text, textbroker will give you feedback on your writing. It is a chance to improve yourself (but there are a lot people criticizing how they give those feedback. I read that some authors with at least 4 stars from textbroker wrote about this area here already. Please search those hubs if you are interested.)
4. Fast payment. They pay you every Friday to your paypal or bank accounts given that you send the request before Thursday and your account due is more than 10 euro.
5. Promotion possibility. If you wrote some really good articles, you could be promoted to a higher level. Personally, I haven't experienced yet. I wrote 16 German articles. They only gave ratings for 9 of them and all were still 2 stars even though some clients gave me good ratings. That's why I'm still a 2 stars.)

Cons:

1. Low income. As a 2 stars author, your payment start out to be very low. They pay you 3,5 euro for every 500 words (3 stars: 4,5 euro; 4 stars: 6 euro).
2. Slow ratings. As their rating affects your level and so affects your income directly. I wrote one article nearly every day after my registration in mid October. They didn't rate any of my articles since early November. If I would be promoted to 3 stars, I should have more exposure to more jobs.
3. Frequent checking of jobs. From my experience, I check very often to hunt for interesting jobs with not-so-low pay. Some other authors are so fast that at the second the job appears, they have taken it already. It is for someone who is so free that he/ she could sit in front of the computer all the day. Especially for taking English jobs, I check every 10 minutes if I sit besides my PC.
4. No copyright of your text. The copyright solely belongs to your client. You even don't know where is your text published if they didn't mention it at the job description. You have the option to ask them, but they are not obliged to answer you. Some blog owners paid authors at textbroker to write their content. They have the right to claim that they wrote the text as they own the full copyright.

But why am I still working there? After all I am quite happy to be a 2 stars German author and a 3 stars English at textbroker. I read online that some other writers complained about the low pay from textbroker. I understand because they are much more professional than me. I didn't say I am satisfied with those few money. But as I said it is my chance to polish my writing in German. Can you imagine that some people would pay you to strengthen yourself?

I'm really looking forward to be promoted to be a 3 stars German author and I hope there will be more English jobs for me.

The authors quality level is determined by the average rating of his 5 most recent articles.

Level 3:
Articles partially show slight weaknesses in one of the following areas:
- spelling
- grammar
- content
- style
- body
- phrasing
- punctuation

Level 2:
Articles generally show weaknesses in more than one of the following areas:
- spelling
- grammar
- content
- style
- body
- phrasing
- punctuation

Source: textbroker.co.uk