As a Voice Transcription Guide, you get 4 cents per question typed out. I do about 3-4 a minute. In the long run, you make slightly more ad a voice transcriptionist, but still I average about $30 for an 8 hour shift do to slow times and weird errors that ChaCha sometimes has. That works out to less than minimum wage anywhere, and by the end of it my back and hands KILL.

Take this information however you want. i don’t claim ChaCha is a scam, but I would never recommend anyone to be a guide themselves.

This plugin works well for me too. I use it on 4-5 sites that I no longer post on, but has timeless info like finance stuff. It makes it so it gets crawled every week rather than sitting dormant. I noticed that sites like that tend to lose their “Active” state for Adsense as well if you don’t post new content, or update the site for a long time. Sites that aren’t real active that is. It causes them to go down a bit in rank if there is no action there.

They posted several comments, and I didn’t get them all until today. I don’t look at comments here very often since I really don’t have that much interest in this anymore.

Must be a ChaCha Employee too because they didn’t even have their own referral link. Maybe ChaCha doesn’t have referrals anymore? Either way it is funny.

I am actually experimenting with Scheduled Post Shift and it seems to work well so far. Big thanks to the author!

Oh yea, everyone go to my website and buy a guitar please.

They started out as a live search engine, of which your article is bashing (with the right reason). when they started the text and voice searches, and as it gradually succeeded. they are no longer the laughing stock of the tech world and raised a few eyebrows. and they have won quite a few awards, and the traffic kept coming in. it took about 2 months to reach the first million queries, but then they got about that much within a couple of days. so then there’s the problem. a query was essentially 20 cents, multiply that by a million, and even a 3rd grader will understand why the guides got a pay cut. (tough luck, guys, hey, it’s a business. the little guys always get screwed over, it exists everywhere and everyday).

even after the pay cut, chacha’s popularity continued to grow and they continued to struggle to find a way to make revenue. they had funds, of course, over 20 million or more, from investors ranging from the simons, rod canion, mort meyerson, to um, rex grossman? but that stuff was not gonna last when u take up three spaces in a luxury outdoor mall, host free friday banquets, bringing in top of the line furnitures and a gigantic plasma tv into ur break room. not to mention the money u used to lure silicon valley guys to come to boring indiana, spending ur money to promote urself at the indy motor speedway events, etc.

so as america went to the polls, chacha raised the axe and cut 15% of workforce. some interns were let go and moderators work were cut down. there was this fear instilled in everyone who was there, but still they stayed optimistic.

u ever wondered why u didn’t see chacha’s ads on tv? because they were afraid of more users. the viral growth is much larger than any tv exposure can bring.

so they went on to start limiting actual guided answers (limiting costs) and started building automated answers database. kinda like google answers but not as dumb. i.e. if u ask “what’s abe lincoln’s birthday”, and if someone has asked it before, then u would automatically get the previous answer. which actually makes the service better cuz it comes back lightning fast. but yeah, sucks for the guides even more, they had a million a day traffic now it is being reduced by the limit, or cap, as they called it. so yeah, their new strategy is to have as less guided answers as possible. but if u r an expediter or transcriber, u would always have job security. so by doing that, chacha’s service actually improved. and their mobile search volume surpassed those of google. but, i digress.

so in the spring they made another cut, this time 15% of the workforce and some of them had been with the organization from day 1. also, everyone else in the company received at 10% paycut. but at the same time, they had implemented ad sales on texts and it is targeted keyword sales. so if u ask a specific question, an ad from the vendor in that specific field would display. so if u ask about tiger woods, maybe the ad will be from a golf pro shop or something. which they claimed to provide higher click through rates. so they were finally receiving income, but it was not enough to cover the expenses. and unfortuantely, i did not survive that second wave of cuts.

i stayed in contact with my ex coworkers, kept up somewhat. they did strategically hiring and hired ad sales execs and agents. as of now, the paycut still hasn’t been removed as far as i know. but chacha is still here and i still use them a lot.

it’s good that chacha has an owner and ceo who is mega rich, so he doesn’t need income from it. scott jones actually puts effort into this company so who knows, chacha might be here a long time. his track record is pretty good.

anyway, that’s my story, and u get the exclusive, for now.