by Honi A.

Created on: May 03, 2010   Last Updated: May 04, 2010

A month ago I would have said that Review Stream is a good site where you can really make some money, with only little effort. After my latest experience with them my list of cons is much longer than the list of pros.

PROS:

- You can review anything you want, starting from the books you have read to the airports you have been in.

- If your review is very good then you will receive $2.50 per piece, which means you only need 20 reviews to reach payout.

- If your review isn't that good you'll be paid at bulk rate, meaning you'll receive 0.50 per review. This means you will need 100 reviews to reach payout.

- The reviews can be at least 200 words, which means you can write at least ten in one day.

CONS: (this is one long list)

- Even though your review is very good and long and displays a personal experience with the item reviewed you'll most likely be paid at the bulk rate.

- You won't get a clear explanation why you got paid at the bulk rate or why one of your submissions got rejected. All my reviews have the same standard advice, no matter what I wrote in them: "SUGGESTION : Please be more specific next time. Don't hesitate to describe your personal feelings about the item you're reviewing."

- The staff is rude and unhelpful: every time I requested further information on why one of my reviews was paid at bulk rate, or what should I do to improve my writing technique they answered in a very patronizing way telling me I should read other peoples reviews or read their guidelines because I will find everything I needed there. I have read other people's reviews I don't understand how they got paid at the same rate as I did because some were full of mistakes.

- If there are more reviews on the same item, most likely your review will get rejected regardless of its quality.

- They say it takes up to 72 hours to approve or deny the reviews except weekends. It usually takes at least a week and you don't even receive a notification: you just have to keep checking to see if and how much you got paid.

- You have to submit your reviews with the same e-mail address you use for PayPal. If you miss this rule and submit with a different address you will never receive your money. Also, if you have submitted reviews with more e-mail address you can't sum them up and make a total.

- They say you receive 10 cents for each vote you receive and once you make $5 on a single article you can withdraw the money. This is by far their biggest lie, because I had about three reviews that had over 50 votes and when I e-mailed them requesting the money they reseted the votes to 0 and told me they will ban my account because they have noticed I tried to deceive the system. This was a lame excuse because I promoted those reviews for a month or so using all the resources they offered.

- More and more people complain now that their accounts have been banned just before reaching $50 and I'm afraid the same thing will happen to me ,too.

- They delete all the comments they don't like and keep only a few that say how great the site is and how many times they got paid: these comments are a few months old, rarely I see a new one making its way through the rest.

- In your control panel you can see now notes made by more experienced reviewers, as they say. Those notes should help you improve your article, but most of the ones I received were plain stupid and with the same grammar errors.

As you can see there are many cons and even though the pros sound promising think twice before starting to write for Review Stream. Because I already worked with them for a while I will try to make it to the 50 bucks limit, but I have little hope I will actually get the money.

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