A Very Honest and Balanced Review of CloudCrowd

Updated on: by Amy Kennedy

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For the past few weeks, I have been using an application called CloudCrowd which uses Facebook as its interface. Its objective is to take work that companies give them and break it down into smaller bits of projects which are then sent to the crowd with specific instructions for completion. It is the very essence of crowd sourcing. As I have been using it in a fairly limited capacity – I have found my niche in website categorization – I am going to give a quick overview of what I like and what I haven’t liked so far about this particular company.

 

Items that I have disliked:

1. Your work is approved or rejected by peers there doesn’t appear to be a vetting process. I have been able to approve or reject work once I hit 35 credibility points. If your work gets rejected you do not get paid whether it was a huge editing job or a .02 web site general service sort.

 2. I like doing the review work but after a little digging, I found that there are simultaneous reviews going on. If you reject work but two other people accept it, you do not get paid because your rejection is overridden.

 3. You only get 8 appeals per month. I maxed that out in the first few days.

 4. While I have been enjoying detailed website categorization, some of the sites can take up to two minutes to view their menu or services because of links or PDF’s. For that particular job, you get paid .07. (I don’t know about you but my time is worth more than 2.10 per hour if you were to work on it an hour straight) Most web sites take less than 1 minute but if it offers many services, I find myself constantly clicking back and forth between the application and the website. If you miss an offered service, your work is rejected.

 5. There are a ton of people in their forum that say more bad than good about the peer review process. Cloudcrowd has a pat answer that states that they cannot keep all the bad apples out of the mix. Without a better appeals process, including more appeals, Cloudcrowd is limiting themselves on generating any kind of accurate feedback on the reviewers.

 6. Cloudcrowd requires you to disable secure browsing. Don’t forget to turn it back on when you are done and run Adaware (free download) every couple of days. I get 40 hits on spyware every time I run the software and I notice a definite slowdown in my internet speed after a couple of days.

7. Credibility points, the adding and subtracting of them seems to be so willy nilly. It might take me 30 categorizations to get from 35 to 50 but it only takes 3 rejections to go from 50 to 35 or even lower. The company can choose to deactivate your account if your credibility goes below 30.

 

After all that, there are several things that I DO like about CloudCrowd

1. It is crowdsourcing at its finest. Akin to the likes of ChaCha and even Swagbucks, you get paid for “work” that other people do.

2. There is a variety of work for all types of skills from marketing writing, to editing, and what I like doing, web site categorization. There is even translation work available. They have a “test” that you can take to do several of those pieces (their vetting process) only an English proficiency test was needed to do the categorization.

3. You get paid the NEXT DAY for all work approved by 10 pm PST. They do this via paypal. So, unlike many of the sites that I have tried to use, there is no minimum payout. You can roll that money into your bank account or use it to shop online.

4. It appears that there are many tasks that you can do is a very short period of time. For instance, website categorization is something you can do in less than 30 seconds if your internet speed is fast enough. You get paid .02 for each approved categorization. Again, we are not talking mega dollars here but it is a little something extra… maybe to do between phone calls or to help pay for Johnny’s baseball glove. You can exit the task at any time and return at any time. After one or 10 it doesn’t seem to matter.

5. They do give opportunities to correct rejected work. You do not get paid the same amount to correct it but it is better than nothing for your time.

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6. The appeals process has been fairly quick and reasonably fair for those reviews that you are able to squeeze in.

 

Overall, I would give CloudCrowd a six out of ten.

Low pay and poor peer review process is a definite deterrent but a little extra cash and immediate pay for your work seem to make it worth a few minutes of my time each day.

Visit CloudCrowd to learn more.

 

 

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Comments

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Stephanie

May 21, 2012 at 2:41 pm

Thanks for this review! It is very helpful.

hassan@fertility diet

October 13, 2012 at 6:09 pm

Thank you so much for your review, at first i thought that this thing is just another scam, but i see now that it is true

Jake Creps

May 8, 2013 at 1:06 pm

Hey! Great article. I just want to give you a few tips to help you update it. You now have 16 appeals a month. They changed it recently. Here is an excerpt from the site.

You are allowed to appeal evaluations that you think are incorrect. In order to appeal, the following must all be true:

You can only appeal tasks that are up to 14 days old.
You can not have more than 8 appeals in process at once.
You may appeal 16 times in any 30 days period.

Thanks for all of the information though.

Marisa Wright@DressforFlamenco

May 23, 2013 at 7:57 pm

thanks for this review – honest and detailed. I was considering signing up, but was a bit concerned when their “FAQ” screen mentioned jobs ranging from less than one cent to $30. It’s sad that writers are so poorly valued online that we could earn a better hourly rate cleaning toilets!

Ryan Gilchrist

June 24, 2013 at 8:59 am

I find slicethepie to be very nice to use. As mentioned in your review, cloudcrowd is quite low paying if you can’t write well.

I recommend this site because you can practice your writing skills and get paid for it, with no risk. You basically review songs, and get paid anywhere up to $0.25 per track reviewed. It’s still not the best pay, but if you are lacking credentials and want to build up in writing tasks for cloud crowd, it’s a brilliant start. There is a minimum payout of $10, but it’s through paypal and quite rapid (Within 5 working days). You could probably make that amount in 2-3 hours of intensive writing.

The only criticism I would give it would be the low hourly rate, however it is far better than cloudcrowd for people starting out (Not people who are experienced writers though) and it’s guaranteed work, too. 🙂

Carolan Ross

October 29, 2013 at 10:50 am

Thanks for this detailed review about Cloud Crowd, just what I was looking for. I’ve registered and passed that first test there but was hesitant to invest much time before knowing more about the big picture.

Don Emery

November 5, 2013 at 3:19 am

Very smart. You had me from the be6innin6. I’m familiar with the site and thou6h I didn’t realize you’d for6otten to mention their referral pro6ram until I saw your fancy “Visit CloudCrowd To Learn More”. That was a nice touch but just a touch over the top. I like the 6 out of 10 rating, too. A 5 was a crap shoot but anythin6 hi6her than 6 would build suspicion which would be just as counterproductive. It wasn’t a flawless presentation but it was very 6ood.

Maria

November 7, 2013 at 11:11 pm

I am thoroughly disgusted with everything about Cloudcrowd. After working doggedly on my articles, they were rejected for credentials because they couldn’t be loaded, even though the site clearly says they will take the docx format. Then I got a critique that I had exceeded the number of words. Gee, I wonder how they knew that since they couldn’t load my work. And why didn’t they put a word count on the test? It only said NO LESS than 200 words, not NO MORE. DEFINITELY NOT WORTH IT. JUNK.