by Jane Rutherford

Created on: July 13, 2008   Last Updated: January 02, 2010

Earning money with ReviewStream is very simple. You write reviews of anything you can think of, from books to movies to cosmetics to your physician and submit them to the site

The site has two paying rates. You can get paid the full rate (which as of 2010 is $2,50) or you can be paid a bulk rate (which is the regular rate divided by 5. At the moment $0,50). From my experience it's more probable to get paid the full rate if you write about a location (hotel, restaurant), any of the topics listed on the main site as “most requested” and if your review is original and nobody else covered the subject before.

However, the brutal truth is that you will not get paid the full rate for all the reviews you submit. It's more probable though, if your review is a minimum of 250 words.

Every time you submit a review you get a confirmation email and I advise you to save that email in case your submission gets lost. It never happened to me, but I've read other people comments, and they've reported that this can be an issue. So better be safe than sorry.

It usually takes up to three days to get your review, from lack of a better word, reviewed. After that time you get an email informing you whether or not your review was accepted or not and which rate has been paid for it. In the same email you will also get a total amount of money you've earned so far.

To have your money transferred to your PayPal account you need to earn a minimum of $50 on your reviews. It is a lot, in comparison to other sites like that, but it all depends on how many reviews can you write.

Apart from getting paid for your reviews you're also paid if somebody votes your review as helpful. Now, the rate is $0.10 for each vote and you get paid once you reach $10 (which means once your review gets 100 votes; I've consulted with several people and they all say that the system doesn't sum up votes to all your reviews). You are allowed to vote for your own reviews, but voting on many reviews in a short period of time is impossible and you'll get very familiar with a system message encouraging you to "at least read the review first". Not to mention that if you vote on your reviews to often, you will get an email telling you to stop playing a system or you'll get banned.

I'm not going to lie to you. I write for Review Stream and I am happy with the money I make there. But it doesn't mean I'm blind to the cons of this site.

For once, you get paid once for every review that gets accepted. And after you are, it's as if you've never written it. Unlike on Helium or other similar sites, you don't get paid the share of the revenue from the ads placed next to your review.

You're also not allowed to re-post the reviews you submit anywhere on the Internet. The reviews you submit to Review Stream have to be exclusive to the site.

And finally, what you really need to remember is to use the same PayPal email when you submit your reviews. You don't register to Review Stream and your PayPal email is the only thing the site recognizes. As of right now, it's impossible to merge to existing emails so if you make a mistake and submit a review from a different email than usual, it will be that much more difficult to get the payment.

In late 2009 ReviewStream introduced a Control Panel, which is actually really helpful in keeping track of your reviews. While emails can get lost, the Control Panel (at least for me) never lost track of any of my recent reviews.

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