by Donna Thacker

Created on: February 12, 2008

It seems like this is a question that a lot of us on the web are trying to figure out. Good luck answering this question! I stumbled onto this site while trying to figure out how to earn some honest money from home. Their home page tells you that they are paying $2.00 per review, not bad for a little writing time. I checked out all of the other information and they seemed quite legitimate, except I still haven't figured out how they determine which articles are the $2.00 quality and which fall into the bulk category. That seems to be the mystery to a lot of other posts I have read about this site.

I was so tired of all of the survey sites that promise you everything, then only fill up your inbox with junk and advertisements, that I decided to give Review Stream a try. I wrote a well thought out review on the new cell phone I had just gotten. I hated that phone and told them so! Immediately, I was emailed and told that the review had been accepted and my account had been credited $2.00. This was great, I'd been complaining about that cell phone for free and now someone had just paid me to voice my complaint! I thought I'd stumbled onto a writing goldmine and started calculating...hmmm, five reviews a day at two bucks each. Well, you get the picture, a lot of us have done it.

Three reviews later and I am still at that first $2.00 mark and wondering what in the world these people want. The last three were rejected as "not specific" enough, whatever that means. I certainly haven't changed my writing style, or how I think, research, spell check, etc, since I sent in the first one. I have read and re-read a lot of the reviews on their site. While some are well written and interesting to read, I found others that have bad grammar, misspelled words, and some that I would flag as extremely vague. And the site is not all that easy to work in. The last review I attempted never even got into the system because it was flagged as not long enough. I cannot find anywhere on their site where it states a minimum length or word count! The site advised me to "go back" and when I did that, everything disappeared, and I needed to start over.

I have read all of the postings I can find on this web site. While some are praising Review Stream as a great site to work with, others seem to be as frustrated as I am. For those who are being accepted and paid the $2.00 rate per review, it certainly is possible to make $50.00 pretty quickly. But for those of us that are spending our time trying to figure out what we are doing wrong, that $50.00 mark seems pretty impossible.

Considering the fact that I have been published in magazines and newspapers, and have articles that do fairly well at Helium, I am extremely frustrated that I can't manage to write an acceptable review. I do not mind criticism or helpful advise when it comes to my writing skills, but out and out rejection without a good explanation really irritates me. So, if you feel like trying Review Stream, it might be a way to make a few extra dollars, if you manage to get through their screening process. But, be warned, because you too might join those of us that can't seem to figure out just what in the world they want.

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