Can The iWriter Platform Make You Any Money in 2021?

byTechRVL

207 followers

5 years ago

Hey guys,

Just keeping you guys abreast on ways to make money online. iWriter is a writing platform that's been around since 2011. Founded by Brad Callen, a fellow affiliate marketer, iWriter has almost a million writers at the ready. Honest reviews are mostly negative, citing several issues with company practices, and low pay, but can the company actually make you any money?

In this quick blog, I'm going to share some of my opinions and experiences writing for them over the past few weeks. This is in the hopes of educating newbie freelancers who are looking to make money before they get sucked in.

iWriter: More of a "slaughterhouse" than a content mill

Brad Callen has gained a reputation over the past 9 years of having one of the most exploitative sites on the internet, especially when it comes to writing. The pay can start as low as 0.097 cents a word for a 150-word product description, after some time on the site, if you get good ratings, you can make up to .10 a word in the more "elite" queues.

Though low pay per word isn't unheard of in content mills, iWriter has consistently been one of the lowest. This is because most of their writers live in countries with much lower costs of living and usually write in the rural areas of those places, making their standards of living even lower. They treat these hard-working folks like crap, I've even heard horror stories of iWriter banning entire countries (such as Kenya) and destroying the lives of tens of thousands in an instant.

Brad and his company are able to get away with these practices because they abuse desperate workers, and they manipulate reviews on the internet via two methods:

- Brad will hire his own writers to review the company, then post these positive reviews on his private blog networks to boost the SEO and reputation of the company.

-He also taps into the exploitative and greedy nature of some lazier freelance writers and marketers by getting them to review this website in a positive light for free articles or credits. Most of the reviews by writers paying for articles from them are usually praising how "easy" it is to get "free" articles from the platform by canceling already completed work once in-hand, and then publishing that work as their own. They also praise Brad's policy of "reject an article for any reason, guaranteed".

They don't see the fact that the writer takes the hit for this, or perhaps do not care. Imagine writing a 300-word article for $1.43, only for someone who can barely speak English to tell you it's "not good enough". You then get that taken away, while the person in question just published your article a month later.

iWriter will usually do nothing about this. Sometimes, in the opposite effect, they will actually ban the person complaining. Some people believe that if you are from places like India, for example, the chances of being banned are even higher. They state in their terms that they reserve the right to ban or cancel accounts without reason.

iWriter (sometimes) pay

That's usually an okay thing, were it not for the reality that they WILL NOT PAY YOU if your account is banned. This is almost absolute if the balance is under their $20 dollar threshold. Again, the legalities of such practices are obscured by the international status of the website itself. This is usually done to non-Americans, as well. This is likely because Brad is aware it's harder to do anything about stealing $16 dollars if you don't have social security and the Department of Labor to track the offender.

That being said, if you decide to work for this terrible company, be prepared for such a scenario. You could very well log into your account and find that you're banned and your few dollars you've made are not even accessible. This will likely be met by apathy from support, or a canned message basically telling you "oh well".

At 0.91 cents for some articles, those 25 articles you wrote basically made that company quite a bit more. If you do manage to not get banned, the pay is dubious. They claim every Tuesday, but that's not true. It's actually every other Tuesday, staggered from the first two weeks or so. I've seen people complain about this before. In my case, I had over 68 dollars and had to wait another full week after I was supposed to be paid to actually get paid. On top of that, I had to argue with support over it, as they acknowledged there was an issue with payroll, but also said "I wasn't obligated to be paid until the Tuesday after the next".

What?? I understand that kind of cycle in a typical payroll system, but waiting two weeks at 0.097 cents a word when you're obviously taking that pay because you're desperate is...inhumane. If it were direct deposit, I'd get it, but PayPal is usually instant. I argued this point, to no response. When I finally did get paid, I was so done with writing for them, that I'd moved on to other companies, such as TextBroker, who though still low on the actual profits, actually pays twice a week and doesn't have all of those horrible exploitative rules in place.

Don't buy articles from them, either. Unless you don't care at all about exploiting writers for pennies on the dollar. Add to that, you get what you pay for. It still blows my mind how people want a 300-word short piece to be split into 4 headers and have a keyword density of 5...

The clients will often also show you a website as an example with a much higher word count, and much more in-depth writing on the topic and go "make it look like this". Brad is also often found on Warrior Forums either insulting people complaining about the services' issues, calling them "liars", or LITERALLY CONTRADICTING himself by then turning around and telling other clients it's okay to exploit writers because he will ban them if they don't do what he wants.

If I could give iWriter a star rating, it'd be 0.1, and the .1 is only because they actually exist.