CastingWords

What is Casting Words?

Casting Words enlists fast typists to transcribe audio and video of focus groups, sermons, market research and other commercial work. However, transcription jobs here pay so poorly, you’re almost certain to earn only a dollar or two an hour.

How it works

For those who want to sign up to work, Casting Words has few requirements. You merely need to be over the age of 18, legally able to work as an independent contractor, and live and work in one of the many countries that PayPal serves. (The site uses only one payment method, so if you’re not in a country served through PayPal, you can’t sign up to work here.) The site also does not accept applicants from California, Washington D.C., Hawaii, Massachusetts, North Carolina, New York and West Virginia.

Otherwise, the site encourages freelancers to sign up by filling out a short form. Some freelancers will be asked to take a transcription test; others will be automatically approved. If you’re asked to take the test, you’ll have 90 minutes to transcribe a short audio or video file. The site is looking for a good command of English and grammar, as well as familiarity with the site’s “Quick Start Guide.”

Assuming your application is approved, you’ll get access to an account dashboard and any available jobs.

CastingWords Review:

CastingWords’ pay structure nearly guarantees below-minimum wage transcription work to newcomers. To be specific, the site pays a base rate that starts at 8.5 cents per audio minute. Does that mean you earn $5 an hour? Nope.

Transcription experts say that any given audio minute could take between 2 and 10 minutes to transcribe. So you’re earning between 1.5 cents and, say, 4 cents per minute or $1 to $2 per hour.

But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Overall

This site hires transcriptionists and editors to work on a wide array of audio and video files.

Transcriptionists and editors click on the “available jobs” tab and can pick up and look at the details of any open work assignments. These include what the job entails, the base pay and the deadline.

If you want that assignment, you can click on the “work on this” button to take it.

Bonus system

However, if you’re a new transcriptionist on the site, you can’t take the higher-paying work. Generally speaking, you’re restricted to taking the lowest-paying jobs on the site until you build up your “badges.” That, according to the site, takes time — on purpose. You’ll do at least 10 jobs before you get a “Trying Hard” badge. This doesn’t appear to move you up the ladder to get better paying jobs.

Indeed, it’s unclear how long you have to work for $1 per hour to start earning more.

And, you should know that even the paltry base pay is not guaranteed. Instead, each completed assignment is “graded” on a scale of 1 to 10. You get paid based on your grade. If your grade is above a 7, you will earn more than the base pay. If your grade is average you get the base pay; if it’s below average, you get nothing at all.

Casting Words calls this a “bonus” system. When you do a perfect job, getting a grade of 9, you’ll get three times the base pay. At beginner rates, that means you’ll earn about $5 per hour, if you transcribe unusually fast. If you get below a 5 — average — the site says they’ve determined that you did so poorly that the job will be trashed and redone. You do not get paid for these jobs at all.

Notably too, you need to wait for your jobs to be graded to get paid at all. That could take up to one month.

More about the bonus pay

So, everything pivots on the “base pay.” How much is the base pay?

For transcription, the site says you’ll earn between 8.5 cents and a bit over one dollar per audio minute. But pay varies widely based on a number of factors, including the type of job, your “badge” level you, and what grade you earn on the assignment. Here’s what the site says:

We have different categories of jobs, including grading, editing, and transcription. Within each category, jobs at different skill levels have different pay rates.

Editing jobs and most transcription jobs are bonus-based, meaning that the better you do, the more you get paid.

Rejected work (grade 0-4) is discarded and redone, so it is not paid
Work graded 5 gets the base pay amount
Work graded 6 gets a total of 1.5 times the base pay amount
Work graded 7 gets a total of 2.0 times the base pay amount
Work graded 8 gets a total of 2.5 times the base pay amount
Work graded 9 gets a total of 3.0 times the base pay amount

Every bonus-based job includes a list showing the exact pay for that assignment, for each possible grade.

Getting jobs

However, while Casting Words says you can pick available jobs when you get accepted to the site, newcomers will find that only the lowest-paying jobs are available to them. That means you’re going to be earning base pay of 8.5 cents per audio minute. And if you do a spectacular job, you’ll get a bonus, so your total pay will amount to 25.5 cents per audio minute.

Does that mean you earn $5 to $15 an hour. No. Each audio minute will take you 2 to 10 minutes to transcribe. So, you’re actually earning closer to $1 an hour.

It’s only after you work for this company for a long time that you might be offered work with higher base rates, according to people who have worked with CastingWords.

Not surprisingly, U.S. workers rate the company poorly on pay. But, several transcriptionists in Kenya were enthusiastic.

Pay

CastingWords pays freelancers once a week via PayPal. (Only graded and approved jobs are paid. It commonly takes at least a week for jobs to be graded and can take up to a month.)

Recommendations:

Transcriptionists from the U.S. can earn more with Transcription Outsourcing and GMR. Non-U.S.-based transcriptionists should consider Rev.

Rev doesn’t pay particularly generously, but it pays better and more fairly than CastingWords.

What their users say: (from Glassdoor)

Low pay, especially at beginning. A glut of new workers can mean little to no work available for long stretches of time. The same can be said for higher paying jobs. It’s feast or famine, but most of freelance work is anyway. Editing pay too low. One grader in particular can be difficult to please, perhaps due to the volume of work he takes on.

LOW PAY FOR SO MUCH WORK INVOLVED. NOT WORTH IT AT ALL.

You can’t really make a living wage at first, you need to prove yourself to be allowed to do better jobs. It’s an investment. Your wage is basically tied to how quickly you can type, which can cause strain on your wrists. This just comes with being a transcriber, a career no one should really pursue.

Low pay. Low, low pay. BUT you are getting paid in experience. If you stick with it, you can move on to higher-paying companies.

No jobs

I have cleared all the exams and joint the CastingWords. But even after 2 months, there is no jobs available. All my friends have facing the same issue. All the time receiving the same message saying that “Your Transcriber rank isn’t high enough for this job”.

Never any jobs actually available
Impossible to level up in rating because of the fact that jobs are few and far between for the beginners.
Pay rate is so low, it may take weeks to even get enough to withdraw.

Updated 7/10/2024