Rev started out as a promising way to earn extra income when the pandemic started. I had a lot of extra time working from home and then not having a social life contributed to me looking for ways to be productive and earn extra income. Therefore, I decided that I would look for ways with the least human contact as possible. Again, this was then.

Recently, I did a job and got a 3/5 and not completely sure why. I read the grading summary and it was not adding up. As I recall, the recording was 60% transcribable due to one of the subjects mumbling a majority of the time, however I got really good at deciphering phrases the person repeated. The punctuation rules in the verbatim transcripts are never completely clear due to the nature of the cross-talking and inaudible segments. This one in particular was fraught with them. It was an hour long. But that was normal for a lot of these and they paid you maybe $30 for it. But see, I had some time to kill and I was good at it, so this termination email I received came out of nowhere for me.

THEIR EMAIL:

Hi [my name],
Your Rev account has been deactivated due to quality reasons that are unrelated to your current metrics.
One or more of the following reasons applies:
Multiple instances of negative customer feedback on your submissions that were validated by our internal review.
Multiple scores that were considered not customer-ready.
Multiple projects sent to be redone.
Internal standards review of your account indicated significant quality concerns.
You will be compensated for any completed jobs prior to your account being deactivated. For general questions, please refer to Deactivated Accounts FAQ.
This decision is final. We wish you all the best in your future endeavors.
Sincerely,
The Rev Team

MY RESPONSE:

To whom it may concern:
I sincerely disagree and wish you all the best in finding better ways to compensate your workers, better 'train' and explain why the scores were not satisfactory, and essentially be a better company in general. I found that I was not coming back and completing more jobs due to the fact that it is not worth the effort or time. I will unfortunately not be in support of or inclined to refer anyone to you in the future. A few years ago I told several people who were looking for filler work when the pandemic started, but now I see that this is not a viable source of income.
The inability to craft 'revvers' to become better at what they do is not something Rev has grasped yet. There is a high diminishing return on jobs like Rev. Please take this email to heart and communicate it to those who craft the content, pay scale, and communications.
Good luck in the development of your company and the humanization of its communications.

Now, I'm assuming that if you are a client, they are okay. I can't be sure, because they clearly allow just about anyone to rate the jobs, so who knows, they probably sometimes give 5 ratings at random even if the work is awful, but I wouldn't know.

I spent a week there, it's not uncommon for they to pay you a fifth part of what they are charging the client, for literally doing all the job, they are not taking a commission out of your hard work, they are giving you a commission out of your hard work, and you know it, they are not making you work at gunpoint. That still doesn't make it okay.

I don't think they deserve the work of the workers who are actually trying to do a good job, and I condone anyone who's doing a mediocre job. But, the way I see it, if I'm going to spend my time doing a job, I might as well do the best job I can, even if it's an unfair place, so that's what I did. The highest rate there is 5, if your average goes below 4.5 they delete your account, there's nothing wrong with that, but their so called standards are no standards at all. As I said, they let just about anyone rate you, they don't rate you themselves, that's a akin to the teacher making your dumb classmates rate you and then not making sure, not caring in the slightest, about you getting a fair review or not.

They should at least let the client rate you, that would make sense. I know for sure that I did a great job, that they handed my good job to the client, that they made good money out of me, and yet, dumb people were rating me at random. Sometimes I would get a 5 for a job that was good and did deserve the 5 but, because of how hard it was, it wasn't as a good as something else, yet that something else would get a 3 for absolutely no reason, the people rating it would just make up the most stupid excuses, my guess is that they don't want anyone else taking the good audio files from them so they just try to get your account deleted, and since it's random, if you are lucky you can probably stay there for years, above 4.5 as long as the 3 loving people don't find you too often. The guys that rate you love giving you 3s at random.

So called standards, because in order to have standards you need to actually pay people what they deserve, and to make sure that the people rating the workers are competent at rating, it's that simple. And OK, you stay because you need the job, and they do you a favor by closing your account for no reason, because you can't stay even if you wanted to, you are now free from their dehumanizing behavior and from making the owner richer for literally doing all the job yourself, BUT what is not okay at all, is that I spent all night working on something, because as I said, I was doing a great job, so I would spend about six hours on a single task, I always finished it on time, they paid me for it, but then, three hours later they deleted my account and decided that for some reason it made total sense to STEAL the money they had just paid me.

That's my problem, that's what my title's about. So, I hope the poor owner one day finally has enough money to afford his groceries, if he needs to steal from his already underpaid workers.
And no, they didn't steal my money because it was a bad job, it had been unfairly rated as a 4 out of 5, but that never stopped them from paying me in the past, it was solely because for some crazy reason they believe is perfectly okay to steal your money, on top keeping all the money you are producing by doing all the job. Apparently not enough, they have to steal too. Because my time isn't worth a thing, right? Because I had nothing better to do with my night than work for them for free, so they could get paid by the client for my hard work anyway, right? One of the most shameless business I've ever seen, I would never hire their services knowing what's going on there. I don't even know how their business has been legal for years.

And I'm not entirely sure, but watch out for Trustpilot, Rev has a 4.6 there, and when I tried to leave this review, the confirmation code to post it would magically never arrive to my email no matter how many codes I kept asking, there was no way to leave my one star review, maybe that's the reason they are rated that high with them, just allow a handful of bad reviews so you don't seem that fishy, but stop most of them. Rev certainly has the money to pay for that kind of questionable service with all the money it steals from their workers.

I was a teacher looking for something to keep me busy and to make a bit of extra money over the summer because the summer program I used to teach for was cancelled due the pandemic. I found Rev on a list of "summer jobs for teachers," and I am sorry that I ever did. I am a 55-year-old English professor who has taught writing and editing for nearly 30 years. I Googled "summer jobs for teachers" and "editing jobs," and Rev came up. I took a grammar test and experimented with the software and thought transcription, while not "editing," might be a good fit for me.

Little did I know then that a transcriptionist has little to do with proper language, grammar, usage, and so on, and everything to do with good hearing and the ability to decipher gibberish and unintelligible audio submitted by people who are too lazy to type their own notes.

Rev is also the antithesis of every teaching philosophy I've ever read or used in my own career. For example, Revvers are "graded" by freelance Revvers who are apparently good enough at transcribing that they can judge others' work. The scale is 1-5, but you have to maintain a whopping 4.5 to continue working for Rev. In the teaching world, that's a B+ average. Keep in mind that this is just to keep the job. "Grades" are cloaked in useless comments called "feedback." One grader gave me a 1 because I – following the customer's lead – labeled a speaker by his shirt. This same customer had labeled speakers "dark green polo," "dark blue button up," and so on in a video I had just finished transcribing. But when I labeled a speaker "male short sleeved shirt" on the next job for the same customer, I was given a 1. My "metrics" obviously fell below 4.5.

Rev graders will tell you that all grades are based on Rev's "style guide." I have taught copyediting for years and I can tell you that Rev's guide is not a style guide. MLA, APA, AP, Chicago, etc. all publish style guides. Aside from telling Revvers when to spell out a number and when to use a numeral, the Rev guide is 20 pages of rules and Rev policies that will then be used to grade Revvers harshly and, eventually, to deactivate (aka "fire") them.

In my case, my metrics fell below Rev's coveted 4.5 on a Thursday and I received a warning email. I worked most of the day Friday to bring up my metrics. However, late Saturday night I received another email that I had been deactivated. That means they fired a 30-year veteran English professor. In all, I worked for Rev for two weeks. The constant emails with my "grades" were demoralizing and humiliating, and anyone deserves more than two days to improve their work.

If all of this was a trade-off for decent pay, some might think the process worthwhile. Our parents taught us that if something sounds too good to be true, then it is too good to be true, and nowhere is this more so than with Rev. Don't let them fool you with the glamour of working from home in your pajamas. We taught through a pandemic, so we know how much fun it is to work from home. Don't let them fool you, either, with promises that as you become a better Revver you'll make more money. After my 45 minutes of training, hundreds of jobs did open to me. However, many of them paid 50 cents or less per minute of transcription (as low as 31 cents) and much of the audio was so bad that I couldn't possibly transcribe efficiently. And when they say they pay by the minute, they mean the minutes of the audio recording, not the minutes that you spend working. Most jobs took me between twice as long and four times as long as the audio because I constantly had to pause, rewind, listen again and again, and try to decipher who was speaking and what they were saying. So a 10-minute project suddenly became anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour and a half of my time. When my accuracy rating fell to 4.4, below Rev's minimum of 4.5, my account was deactivated and I was no longer able to work for Rev. At that point, I had worked a total of 250 minutes and 55 seconds and had earned $158.32. Keep in mind that those four hours (250 minutes) were the length of the audio files, not the time I worked. So if I worked, say, 12 hours, I made $13/hour, which is less than minimum wage in some states.

The quality of the audio was another problem. One audio I transcribed was two heavily-accented people talking while a crew was felling trees in the background. Yes: felling trees. In other cases, people talked over each other, talked through noisy locations like a boiler room, or talked so fast that I couldn't understand them. Rev's software can't transcribe these poor audio files, but Rev expects human transcribers to be correct 90% of the time. It's worth noting the good work that I did. Of 24 jobs, 18 were graded. Of those 18, I earned 10 perfect 5's; five rankings of 4; two 3's; and a 2; I earned the 1 on "formatting," not accuracy. Accuracy is why I was deactivated.

My fellow teachers (and anyone, really), all of this is to say: if you want to occupy your time and make a bit of extra money over the summer, then tutor. Or just apply for a job at your local Six Flags amusement park. You'll have a wear a silly uniform and they might (though it's unlikely) assign you to the most degrading of jobs like cleaning the restrooms. But you won't be "graded" (aka, demoralized and humiliated) by an invisible "Revver" and you can go home feeling good about yourself and your value in the workforce.

I was pretty hyped to start doing online audio transcriptions, as I am a pretty fast and accurate typist, and I can do this from home! Going in, Rev gives you a couple "training" videos, which are actually just you transcribing short, challenging audios, with them popping up "tips" here and there. You are given 100 audio minutes to prove that you are able to transcribe accurately, and you are graded after each piece of work you do to that endeavor, even the training videos. You can be scored between 1-5,5 being "near perfect". You get your sores after each audio you transcribe, along with about 50 thousand other email "reminders" to tell you that your work is below average (even when all your scores are 5's), and to remind you of late work (even when over an hour remains until the deadline). It's a LOT of emailing. My biggest issue is, after a week of busting my hump on audio transcriptions (I'm talking 4 hours+ to transcribe a single 20 minute audio file), and scoring 5's the entire time, I still got terminated after my 100 hours claiming my scores didn't measure up to their standards. Again, I scored 5's on all of my work, which is the highest score you can have, and somehow they averaged all 5's to be JUST under the 4.5 mark... and here's the kicker; there is no way to dispute your score. My account was terminated ASAP. I was unable to login, and I was unable to ask about or dispute my score. Once you become one of their transcriptions (assuming that's actually possible), they claim you have access to more jobs, and higher wages, however I believe that this is a SCAM, to get cheap transcription work. I was indeed paid for the 100 hours I did transcribe, however it was at the minimum pay amount despite my perfect 5 scoring. They pay you through paypal, without fees. I am tempted to start a second trial account, in order to determine if I would be terminated again after another 100 perfect hours, but at the same time I am trying to tell myself that it wasn't me, that it's just a crappy company. It sucks to work so hard on something only to be told you aren't good enough with CONSTANT email reminders telling you that you are below their average transcription standard, especially when you are literally scoring the highest possible score for accuracy AND formatting. You also have to fight for audio files to transcribe. One or two will pop up every hour or so and you have to basically sit and constantly refresh the page, and race to be the first to "claim" it. The instruction manual instructs you to carefully preview the audio file before claiming it, to determine if it's within your ability range (accents, bad audio quality, etc), but do not do that. You just grab and go; and if you miss it, you're out of luck until the next one pops up. There are also VERY conflicting instructions. You are given a manual to read that explains their formatting procedure, and what words to omit, etc. however some of the people grading your work have graded me incorrectly (they put notes in your grades on what you did wrong, if anything), such as, you should have used a hyphen rather than an ellipses, even when the manual tells you to use an ellipses in that situation (small errors in small quantities will not apparently affect your scoring). They also send you a mandatory quiz about halfway through your training hours, to see how you are doing, and they give you tips and answers in the quiz which actually do NOT coincide with what the manual says. They literally set you up to fail by giving you completely conflicting instructions. I did enjoy their intuitive UI used for the transcribing, however. Keyboard commands to insert timestamps, and to back up the audio; to pause and play with just keystrokes makes for quicker work, however I cannot get passed the idea that Rev is scamming you (while shaming you) for cheap transcription work before they drop you and move on to another. Don't waste your time.