The pay is awful and is kept secretive until you've passed a week-long probation. Even after being hired, they still show you pay-scales that include senior positions and, therefore, don't reflect the reality of what you'll be paid in the slightest. You receive base-pay plus additional pay per article published, and they'll attempt to convince you that you can write so many extra articles that you'll make plenty of money. The reality is that simply reaching the bare minimum quota is an oppressive workload. You're expected to write about 2,500-5,000 words a day (2.5 large articles or 5 small ones) and, when factoring in their extremely overzealous per-paragraph wordcounts, very specific formatting requirements, image sourcing and editing, SEO and hyperlink work and general proofing, that will equate to around a 10-hour day -- more if you actually care about the work you're doing. Additionally, far too much of the job relies on things being signed off by other people. You sit down to start the work day and you'll check the list of articles that need writing -- more often than not, anything good has been snapped up immediately and you're left with about five options for articles about TV shows you haven't watched (and no one else wants to write about either). Instead of sitting around doing nothing, you'll start putting your own pitches together (which requires extensive research -- you can't say "How about this idea?" and then go and research it. You have to present a full outline of the entire piece complete with research, which can easily take an hour or two). You then have to submit those pitches and can easily be waiting for another 3+ hours to have anyone look at them. In my experience, the pitches that were selected and were rejected were completely and utterly arbitrary and only around half of the pitches would actually get approved (meaning hours and hours of research work went down the toilet). Staff also have absolutely no regard for others because the entire thing is just a clickbait factory. Very little help or support is actually offered to anyone and the feedback for writing can be downright rude at times, often telling you that things are "wrong" or "incorrect" when they're actually just down to the house style being different in ways that the training didn't cover. Some copy editors will even differ in their opinion of what is right and wrong, meaning that you can't even necessarily win by being consistent. The training is extensive in that it takes a week, but it actually misses a great deal of what you need to know to do anything there. Despite, at times, encouraging your personal voice and a sense of humor to come through, you also have to write in their bland house style which means that any personality and humor is removed or rewritten. Despite promising you the freedom to work whatever hours you wish, there are arbitrary deadlines on every article. You can't, for example, pitch 50 articles at once to ensure that you've always got something to work with, as nothing is ever approved with more than 2 days to write it. Most articles have a deadline of the same day. Their internal communication is terrible, too. You will, for example, get an extension to a deadline approved only to have other people send you messages chasing up why it's "late". I received messages from people chasing work from me weeks after I'd left the job -- and that's despite ensuring there weren't unfinished tasks left behind. There's also stupid amounts of extra, repeated work. It's compulsory to write an extensive bio for your profile on the site, for example. Despite being writing work, this sort of thing is unpaid. To ensure you hit the minimum quota, you also have to log your work in a terrible, basic spreadsheet (that's completely ill-equipped for the job). This is in spite of them having this information tracked in multiple other places that you also need to update. They'll try to sucker you in with promises of high pay if you perform well and there's a degree of sunk-cost fallacy at play after the extensive application process, but the reality is you'll work yourself to the bone attempting to keep up with the minimum work requirements, and that's after wasting hours sitting around, unable to even do any work because you're waiting for approvals from people. It's an absurd workload and the pay is, quite frankly, insulting, even when compared to similar websites.
