Kitty T.

When I first started my career in freelance writing, I began at Textbroker.com. For a new writer, the pay seemed okay, although certainly not enough to pay the bills, and the articles that were ordered covered interesting topics. After adding several other similar writing sites to my arsenal of work sources, I saw that Textbroker is one of the lowest paying companies for writers. They have not improved their pay rates at all since I joined them five years ago.

Over the past couple of years, their clients who place direct orders and team orders are increasingly needy, unnecessarily nasty in their communications, and they all promise "tons" of work that never materializes. There are always chances to apply to write for specific teams, but after being accepted to join numerous teams, 99% of them never posted any work. I recently was accepted to a team, was unable to begin writing immediately, as in that very day, due to another writing project commitment, and was dropped from the team less than a week later. I guess they expect people to be satisfied with making only the pennies that Textbroker pays without taking on outside gigs. I have a direct order client, who I will be dismissing soon due to his poor communication, who has been sending me messages that he is sending work "on a couple of minutes," then "can you start today?" (when I had already stated that I was available on that day), then "I will send work tomorrow" and here I am still waiting. His instructions for assignment number two, which is the one I am waiting for, contradict his rewrite instructions for assignment number one. He must have liked my rewrite of assignment number one because he accepted it, rated it highly and paid a substantial bonus for it - the least he could do since the article took much, much longer that it should have due to his strange demands. Finally, I do not like being asked to write material that is either unethical, misleading or downright incorrect, which seems to be too frequently at Textbroker. From what I have read, clients for whom a writer has never written before can blacklist the writer - based on what reasoning, I have no idea

The forums seem to have no moderators, and so they seem to be hotbeds for nasty attitudes and pointless snarky comments. This is not the case on the forum where I do most of my content site writing these days.

Finally, the article topics on Textbroker have become more trivial and ridiculous than ever. 90% of the titles are just little product description blurbs. Gone are Textbroker's days of writing informative articles about relevant topics, it seems. Where health topics used to cover illnesses or treatments, they now want product descriptions for supplements and rehab clinics.

I rarely write at Textbroker anymore. I have held on to one client who is pleasant to work with and provides interesting and enjoyable topics, and I will give a new direct order or team order client who approaches me a chance. I would not recommend this company to writers these days. Even as an entry level writer, there are other sites where you can do significantly better.