June 10, 2016 at 7:29 am

@rachz85 It did feel much better t talk about my frustration – and to read the encouragement from my friends here on LB!

June 10, 2016 at 7:28 am

@bestwriter You do touch on a number of very interesting topics, Grace! I find that I learn about a lot of things from you. I only wish sometimes there were more details in the posts. You leave me wanting to know about the subject in more depth, and I think when you get writing longer pieces the charm and warmth come out so much more in your writing too.

As for my presence on the web, it is emergent at best. I know so many other talented writers and internet specialists who are head and shoulders above anything I am doing right now. I just keep trying to learn from them….

June 10, 2016 at 3:15 am

@4cryingoutloud It’s going much more smoothly today, thanks. I’m a little sleepy, but managing to be at least somewhat productive.

June 9, 2016 at 11:36 pm

@sunil I forgot to ask, have you published anything on Listverse? I don’t think I know any other writers who have. It would be good to learn about someone’s personal experience with the site.

June 9, 2016 at 11:34 pm

@sunil Yes, I had been considering Listverse. I have a couple of other high-paying sites I want to look into as well. I need to become more familiar with the type of content each is looking for, and then I’ll try to pick a few to test out.

June 9, 2016 at 11:19 pm

@morgoodie It was definitely a way to set a bad tone for the day. And I had not accomplished much the day before, either. Hubby was restless all day and was distracting me from my work. I think that may be why yesterday was so frustrating…

I am really surprised at how often Grammarly just gets things wrong. It claims to be such an advanced app, but I think it could really be misleading for someone who is just learning English or who has a poor grasp of English mechanics and grammar.

June 9, 2016 at 11:16 pm

@sunil You do realize that’s not the real queen, right? It’s a satire account. Queen Elizabeth would never be so rude.

@peachpurple The phones we have were all bought new, but I suspect the reason they were selling them (instead of giving away with a contract for mobile service) is that some were known to be defective. Plus they weren’t the latest models.For the most part, they’ve worked well until recently. But we’ve long had issues with things like receiving multiple copies of the same text, sometimes over a course of hours or even days. And on my phone in particular, I’ve had issues just accessing the phone app when I need it. It’s very slow, and the entire screen will often go dark as soon as I dial.

For the most part, they’ve worked well until recently. But we’ve long had issues with things like receiving multiple copies of the same text, sometimes over a course of hours or even days. And on my phone in particular, I’ve had issues just accessing the phone app when I need it. It’s very slow, and the entire screen will often go dark as soon as I dial. So if I need to dial in an extension number or navigate through an automated menu, it can be impossible to do. I may have to hang up and try again later. Very inconvenient!

I do think I might have been letting the batteries charge too well. I always let them run down to 30% or less, but then I’d charge to 100%. I discovered later that you get a longer battery life from staying between 40% and 80%, and not allowing the battery to charge fully after the first time.

Yes, we do also have a digital alarm clock but I think my daughter turned it off yesterday.

BTW, today my husband woke me in a panic at 6:30 am, thinking it was 8:30 am and the kids were late! He had gotten up 30 minutes before the alarm, and misread the clock, LOL!

June 9, 2016 at 10:58 pm

@morgoodie Daylight savings was originally intended to be a temporary measure during wartime. I think it’s about time we all stopped doing it! Maybe then we could do away with income tax too! That was a wartime measure, as well 😛

June 9, 2016 at 10:52 pm

I just wanted to say that I requested my first payment from TextBrokers UK, which should arrive around the same time as my first LB redemption. They pay out each Friday to any member who has at least 10 euros on account, and who makes a payment request by Thursday.

One thing that was quite impressive is that instead of getting a simple pop-up message to confirm the payment request had been recorded, there was a full-page credit note issued for tax purposes. It verifies the PayPal address and shows what the payment is for. It’s all written up in English and German, as their UK site is one of the international branches managed in Germany.

If anyone here is a native or very fluent speaker of German, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, or any other language commonly spoken in Europe, it might be worth checking to see if you can write for one of the other international sites. If you click on the little flag at the top of any TextBrokers site, it will bring up a menu for all of the sister sites.

June 9, 2016 at 10:44 pm

@manasi The support staff is wrong about the time zone. It’s simply impossible the time is set to coincide with any of the US time zones.

I don’t worry much about the timestamps on my history, except in terms of things like deadlines for redemption. But it is good to know, if there isn’t going to be 24-hour support for the site, when the staff members are available to deal with problems and answer questions.

Since there seem to be only two staff members on the site and they seem only to be available a few hours at a time, it has become easy for abuse to be posted in the forum. When users try to report, it can be a very long time before anything is done. So it’s natural to wonder where the staff members are located, and when is the best time to reach them.

June 9, 2016 at 10:37 pm

@nakitakona13 No, you wouldn’t have been able to read the comment here because I deleted it and left the other remark in its place. It was a comment I meant to add to a post, and I got a little lost when my browser shut down unexpectedly!

I am in Canada. Some people here will grow celery, but mostly because they have caught the recent trend for regrowing vegetables from the ends that most people throw away. I don’t think it’s a very common addition to most people’s vegetable gardens, perhaps because it’s perceived as difficult to grow.

I don’t even think I’ve ever seen celery on offer at the farmer’s market, come to think of it. Our celery usually comes from the grocery store. The bunch costs about $4 here as well. Sometimes it’s a nicer, fuller bunch with longer stalks and fewer leaves at the top. Other times there are a lot of blemishes and fewer, shorter stalks.

The bunches picked for sale at the less expensive of our two grocery stores are obviously harvested prematurely, as they often have many under-developed stalks at the heart of the bunch. I would say that perhaps 1/3 of each bunch at that store is immature stems and leaves, which I mostly set aside for making soup. I prefer to buy the more mature bunches at the premium grocery store. Though they are more expensive by a bit, I get more celery from them!

June 9, 2016 at 10:25 pm

@melissa1024 Best of luck there! It’s a good site if you can find assignments that suit your interests and knowledge base.

June 9, 2016 at 10:24 pm

I have redeemed once and am expecting my first payment from LB within the next day or so. I am taking things slowly this month because I’ve had higher paying writing to do elsewhere, but I am still active on the site.

With only six posts so far this month, I am almost at the halfway point to the next redemption. I’ll be happy as long as I reach $5 by the 15th. I’m fairly sure that will actually happen sooner, but I do allow extra time in case something comes up.

June 9, 2016 at 10:19 pm

@thinker I just wanted to clarify that there are no such things as plagiarism laws. Plagiarism is passing off someone else’s work as your own. It’s a form of academic or journalistic dishonesty, but it’s not illegal. Copyright infringement is, however, illegal. Even if you give credit for the use of a person’s artwork or texts, if you don’t have permission to use them and your project doesn’t fall under fair use, you are committing copyright infringement. So those who think  they can “borrow” a post or even a chunk of a post, or use a copyrighted photo without asking, are breaking the law even though they give credit.

I have to wonder why you would even compare AC/Yahoo to Bubblews. There was no similarity in the two business models at all, and the requirements at AC were much more stringent.

AC demanded 450-600 words when Bubblews asked barely more than most people write in a Tweet. AC limited the sites you could use for images and required a full image credit. Bubblews had a CEO who personally committed copyright infringement in many of his posts.

I was a featured contributor in two areas at AC and also wrote some special assignments for Yahoo when they took over. I can tell you the payment model at AC was far different from that of Bubblews. Instead of churning out potato posts, all the US members were paid upfront for each post they submitted for consideration. Many earned $2-$5 for each post, plus page view bonuses. And Yahoo? I think the highest they paid me for a single 450-word article was $100.

So while people at Bubblews were able to earn a $100 or more in a month for their potato posts, many of the successful writers I knew at AC could earn $2,000 a month, much of it passive because they’d built a catalogue of quality posts. And that was sustainable until Yahoo took over and ruined the site.

Bubblews’ business model was doomed from the start because they were offering more money to members than they were earning from ads. They had to have known it from the start, but they let people blame spammers when they ran out of money from the rich Daddy and their angel investors and stopped paying people. They even targeted people in developing countries to stop paying first. They knew exactly what they were doing.

June 9, 2016 at 9:54 pm

@bestwriter It’s important to be happy with your writing and your approach to earning on the site. It’s good that you were able to make certain observations, and that you can still reach the redemption point with shorter posts.

For myself, the observation I’ve made is that my longer posts take a little extra writing, but that’s not where the effort lies for me. So I don’t mind it. Because it takes effort to create graphics, choose a title, and later to promote a post, for me it’s worth it to do these things fewer times because my longer posts earn better.

It took me only 18 posts to cross the finish line, and I know a good number of those posts were shared by others on social media. The result is that more than 1/3 of what I earn at LB is passive income and my average earnings per post remain high enough that even if I don’t post even once a day, I can still cash out by month’s end.

I may be a turtle, but I expend less energy to create higher quality posts that make me happy. And I do still cross that finish line.