Well, after going through the learning process of uploading quizzes directly and cutting and pasting from Word, there were more changes that became burdensome.
The employer initially wanted difficult quizzes about obscure television series knowledge. I personally, tried to write questions about some of the most famous episodes (of I Love Lucy) for example, but then the employer said that these needed to be easier questions about more general information.
When that happened, I was slightly confused. After all, I knew the "hints" had to be a mainstay of my employers income. The hint was supposed to be blatant. ("Begins with the letter N" "First alphabetically" were a few I and other freelancers would frequently use for example.) When the quiz taker clicked on the hint, a commercial would play. (Talk about click bait, these guys had it down to a science.) If you turned on add blocker to prevent the rest of the ads from attacking you while you took a quiz, you would not be able to access the hints, and initially, I don't think the site would run at all with adblock on.
Now, we were supposed to use more general questions, I did not know how they would continue making money (of course there were still hundreds of ads on the quiz page and of course not everyone would know the answers). The worst part about this was that I could no longer watch the top 35 favorite episodes of the television show to come up with my questions. Now, I had to watch almost the entire series. Thankfully, they began adding movies to the list to choose from. The down side was that I had chosen Dark Shadows (the old show) and still had to make one for that. With over 1000 episodes, I was not happy. I think it took two weeks to a month just to make that one quiz, which was not worth the money.
Employers and freelancers often focus on word count (I know I do) when it comes to payout. At this point in time (the beginning of my click bait quiz employment), I was averaging about 2000 words per quiz. It worked out to about 5 cents per word, which is lower than I like, but okay for the work (at the time) of watching old movies. But, the big problem is that word count was not an accurate method of determining quiz value. By the end of my quiz career, I was writing mostly non-movie quizzes that often took two or three days to complete. $100 for 2-3 days of work is not a good or fair price. Even at the beginning, spending 2-4 weeks writing one Dark Shadows quiz was not a good deal at that price.
I think the hardest part of being a freelancer is beginning a job only to find it will take way more time and effort than what you bid on the project. In this case, hourly rates are much better. Sometimes it can be hard to judge whether a per word or per hour rate is going to give you the best deal for your time. I certainly can write a lot of words per hour- up to 2000. If I am purely writing, that means $100 for 2000 words isn't bad.
In the case of this, I switched to movies shortly after my Dark Shadows experience. With a movie, all I had to do was watch the movie and pause it when I came up with a question. That meant most quizzes were finished in three to four hours. I also did not consider quizzes to be my sole source of income. Still, it is important for employers to reimburse freelancers when they change the terms. At first this might seem silly because why would you pay more for something you can get for less, but the reason is that the good freelancers will not continue working with you. I could have been working full time for the quiz company, but I chose to do other work until more movies became available. I am pretty sure most of the other freelancers felt the same because the list in the early days did not go down very quickly. Either that, or they didn't mind making so little just to have a regular job.
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