I have read an article about Textbroker.de at both Internetmarketing-News and the Affiliateboy and since I am also experimenting with this content-creation service for a few days now, I want to add my opinion of this service.

Textbroker brings together producers or articles on the one hand and those searching for content on the other. They are advertising that they have recruited more than 6.000 writers. The compensation is based on word count. The writers receive between 0,2 and 4 cent per word depending on the level of quality – the client pays between 0,4 and 6 cent. In light of this, it seems a little strange that additionally there is a processing charge of 30 cents per order. The level of quality goes from one to five stars. New copy-writers start out with 3 stars and are then classified due to their performance after they have finished their first few jobs. It is funny how the measurements of these levels are worded completely different on the pages for writers and clients. While three stars will say “very good quality” on the writers page, three stars will only say “average quality” on the customers page.

In the last few days I requested 20 texts about regions and areas of Germany. The task was to write a relatively short and informative text about the area. An exemplary text was added to clarify what was wanted. I decided to use quality level two, seeing that these were to be short texts which, besides skimming through the Wikipedia article of the region, had no other qualifications than to be written in proper German.

The results were extremely diverse. There were texts which I could adopt without making any changes and there were – sadly quite a few – those that were just out of the question. I would not have thought it possible to fit so many grammatical-, spelling- and informational-errors into such a short text. In these cases, Textbroker is offering the possibility of having the text revised or rejecting it altogether. I first chose the revision but after the changes to the text were not sweeping enough, I chose to reject it.

My conclusion is that I will keep relying on students that are sitting in our office and I might use Textbroker for small commissions that need to get done in a timely manner, where the quality is only a secondary concern. I think that the main problem at Textbroker is that the lower quality levels should also show a certain degree of minimum quality: Spelling and grammar are not thinks that can be argued about. The operators of this platform will have watch out that they are not inviting in clients that are otherwise trying to make a few cents through obscure “browsertoolbars” or “raffle-tickets”.