I Tried Typing Subtitles for $12 an Hour

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[Holstead]

After a 5 month break, I'm back on it! New money-making videos coming in Jan 2023! 😍

[peperonypeperony]

I've done a lot of transcription work, and it is basically slave labor. Transcriptions with several people talking over each other are absolutely grueling, and the companies that contract transcriptionists have zero respect for how difficult the job is and expect you to be inhumanly accurate to their extremely complex guidelines... all for basically nothing. Never do this kind of work unless you are employed and guaranteed an hourly wage. Piece-rate tasks in general are never as profitable as they claim to be.

[victoriasteele]

As a deaf person who relies on captions, I appreciate and am so grateful for the time and effort that people put into adding captions to videos that would otherwise be inaccessible to me. Thank you!!!

[CZsWorld]

I'm assuming most people use AI generated captions and then just go through and fix them. When I used Rev in the past, it has me submit a script which the captioner can use so then all you have to do is set timings.

[KittenoftheBroccoli]

I gave Rev a try back in 2016 when I was a jobless high school student, and needless to say I didn't last very long. Mfers would literally submit recordings of meetings that sounded like they placed the microphone at the far end of a football field, and then reject my captions submission that I'd already worked upwards of an hour on because I didn't know how to interpret "liunfl gsk jdali uhsdf", which was half the recording. Seriously, I'd even get started on recordings attempted by multiple other transcribers (because if you give up halfway through, they still keep everything you already typed and not pay you) and would quickly realize why they all gave up. These Rev customers legitimately expected us to have the listening comprehension of a literal god.

[Vailskibum]

I really can't imagine anyone doing this as their full time thing, awesome vid!!

[jessicabidon]

They recently added a policy where, if your accuracy rating is graded to be less than 3/5 (meaning it needs to be re-edited by another transcriptionist), you just won't get paid for that project at all. So it makes it really risky to do longer projects, but those are the only ones where you really make any money at all. And the graders can be really finicky and unforgiving at times. I recently had a project where I got a 3/5 because I omitted one person's line when they said a complete sentence at the same time that someone else was also saying a complete sentence. The captioning software literally would not let me put all that text on screen.

[iamontda]

Writing captions for videos you care about is super fun. Helped write captions for a handful of Markiplier videos before Community Captions was removed because I loved the content and wanted to contribute. Being made to do captions for whatever the heck others desire, however.. not so much. I do enjoy that Rev gave you a style guide, as I have no idea what closed captions standards look like and would've appreciated it back in the day

[curlypuff]

This is so validating. Ive struggled with work and tried doing transcripting IT WAS NOT WORTH THE PAY AT ALL and so much of the audio I was doing was so hard to understand. It wasn't for YouTube videos, where people are more likely to be clearer or using better audio equipment, it was for ANYTHING. Once I transcribed an abusive phone call ;-; hearing those weird things was interesting but yeah an hour of work for 50 cents? I'm good thanks. Although I think a lot of people actually use the assistance of programs making auto captaions then you just edit and format it. I started doing that but still doesn't feel worth it idk.

[akinyemipaulmayo]

If only other YouTubers would be half as honest. All those great captions beneath your YouTube video that raises people expectation and only give them a shitload of work for nothing is so annoying. Thank you for this video and for putting all the work in just so we know. You are amazing!

[GoHerping]

that's pretty wild, I always thought Rev was auto generated and then humans simply come in to correct any issues. I used them for every new video when it was $1/minute (and my channel was more profitable) and the captions were almost always perfect and quickly delivered. I have to assume it's non-English speakers, because there were often words that sound similar to what I was saying, but didn't make any sense in the context. Like, if I said "We're taking a walk in the park" and the captions read "We're taking a walk in the cart".

[andyqmai]

This video is eye-opening and sheds light on the often overlooked and undervalued work of subtitling. It's astounding to see how much effort and attention to detail is required to create accurate subtitles, and yet the pay for such work is often meager. It's important to recognize the importance of subtitling in making content accessible to a wider audience, and to ensure that those who do this vital work are compensated fairly for their time and expertise. Thank you for sharing your experience and bringing attention to this issue.

[wooden]

Ayyy Rev was my first "job" out of high school and after dropping out of college. It was decent for pocket money given the fact that i wasn't doing anything else with my time. I didnt have a car or any way to get a ride to work either, so Rev actually worked out well for me for about half a year until i was able to get something more stable going. The trick is to level up your account to at least tier 2 (better pay rates, more options to choose from, etc) and to hunt for podcasts. They usually have decent audio, are long (pays more per audio minute and in general is just a better use of time than doing a bunch of short ones) and some were even interesting to listen to. I avoided court cases and bodycams cuz they are near impossible to hear due to poor audio quality. All in all Rev was ok, or at the very least held me over for a bit.

[GreetsGaming]

I worked for REV as a salesperson for a short time. Not long after I was hired, there was a drastic change in direction with their sales leadership. This change unfortunately led to myself and all of the other recently hired sales employees being laid off due to the fact that they chose to entirely eliminate the inside sales team that they had spent months filling out. Why they even hired us in the first place is a mystery to me, and this event acts as a constant reminder to me that employers see us first and foremost as units of productivity to be discarded when they think they no longer need us.

It's really interesting to see this candid review from a transcriber's perspective. It seems like working for REV doesn't just suck for salespeople.

[liazavala]

As someone who’s been doing this for about 2 years, the first couple of months are so shitty. You don’t get paid well at all and it honestly feels like it’s not worth anything at all. After a while, you’ll realize that it gets easier. It took me about a year to be able to make a decent amount of money. In Ecuador, where I’m from, a minimum wage job will make you $425/month. This is obviously not enough in more developed countries, but a job like the one that’s been reviewed should help live quite comfortably in a country like mine.

[AA-ztbp]

I've been a transcriptionist for over a decade. Rev and other ones that sell it as an easy gig are the worst, you regularly make sub-minimum wage. Rev's prices are ridiculously low for the quality of audio they give you.

I see others in the comments saying transcription across the board is slave labor, which isn't true. It can be a wonderful and rewarding job if you know where to look for work, but it's getting more and more difficult to break into the industry. If you want to pursue transcription, the CHEAPEST you should accept is $1.00/audio minute, which if you're able to complete an hour of sound in four hours which is average, you make $15/hour.

Please if you ever need transcription for something, seek out a small business and pay them a fair amount rather than pay Rev or AI transcription to do it. It's a difficult job to be accurate and quick, and those of us who have been at it and are really good at it are constantly being undercut by the gig and AI companies who do far worse. It's difficult to find a place that pays fairly and has enough consistent work, but it can be really rewarding when you find a niche. I used to transcribe podcasts, Congress, oral history interviews, etc... and many of those client have taken their work to cheaper, worse companies to save a penny.

If anybody has been interested about transcription before and has questions, please don't hesitate to ask!

[victoriab]

I used to do Rev, I was only on it for a few days. After I was accepted I "leveled up" after a day or two to get higher paying gigs. I got a bad grade on one of my transcriptions and it leveled me down. Got another bad grade on another assignment and it kicked me off the platform all together. They grade pretty harsh for low pay.

The most positive thing about the experience was being able to transcribe a not yet released episode of one of my favorite reality TV shows. Everything else was pretty boring.

[royregis]

Glad I’m not the only one who found Rev work mind-numbingly bored and horrendously underpaid. After doing a couple of jobs I quickly worked out that the wetter paid jobs were the ones with longer sessions which I could not afford to start for fear of not meeting the deadlines and getting booted off the platform as Jon says. It’s dreadful work really.

[RedGiraffe]

That's so stupid that this is so little money. Thanks for sharing this with us Jon, I always love watching your videos because they are so money informative. Keep it up!!

[sarahmiller]

Wow, this is so surreal! I worked full-time at Rev for over two years, and remember crying after my first day because of how little I made ($4.30). I got WAY faster with time though and even ended up doing quality control for other captioners (knew that damn Style Guide front to back). But even with how fast I got, and with being one of the top captioners on the site, I could never pull more than $250 from 32-hour work weeks... which is REALLY FREAKING GOOD by Rev standards and also well below minimum wage in my state.

Rev is an okay-ish option for people in VERY specific situations (like me, I was a student and living at home, so I didn't need much income-wise), but otherwise it's straight up exploitative. Their turnover is extremely high and their captions end up being pretty hit-or-miss because of it. It's a shame because good captions are such an important service and Rev could really stand to make a difference if they cared more about compensating/retaining agents.