Freelancing at Home

Yes, I could probably come up with a more creative title but, seriously, Examiner sucks. Nothing more eloquent is needed.

The pay is absolute crap - they recently decided they can no longer afford to monetize international page views, despite the international pages still having ads on them, so Examiners are not getting paid for all views anymore, they also continue to find reasons to drop flat-fee payments and change them frequently (my theory is it's an attempt to get you to keep doing x without realizing x no longer earns you a flat-fee - and this happens often on the forum). I feel bad for anyone reporting about international news; my own pay hasn't dropped since I didn't have much of a foreign audience, but many do, and the pages are still clearly monetized, meaning someone is getting paid for it, just not the writer.

The support center, meant to be your one stop shop to figure out how to write for the site, is missing important information, contains outdated information and contains outright incorrect information (they change the newsworthy requirement to 48 hours at least 3 months ago, but all the support information still states 72 hours).

And, worst of all, they have terrible independent contractor service. I dread, absolutely dread, having to send them any sort of support ticket, because at least 50% of the time I receive some completely snarky, inappropriate or unhelpful response back. Send them a ticket, along with screenshot evidence, that the site has something broken, they'll send you a message back telling you it's working fine on their end. Not even kidding, that was the extent of several of my ticket responses about problems on the site. Have a problem with a review of your article being incorrect - citing spelling errors that are not actually errors, for example - and you may get lucky and have them overturn it, or you may get the 'senior manager of content and media' (I don't know how many people with that title they have, but every time I've gotten someone with this title, they're an ass) who argues that it was correct or that it doesn't matter so just ignore it.

And, of course, anytime I try to write heavily on the site - either because news is booming in my topic, or because I'm trying to focus on making more money that month - something will inevitably go wrong and I'll have to submit a support ticket.

Well, I feel better. I just needed to vent about how awful this site is. Sadly, I can't escape it either, because you have to post once a month in order to receive payment for older articles. I don't want to lose payment for 400 articles.