Is LOLWOT a legit writing opportunity?

Photo: tomcaraccio.com.au

If you're looking for a site to practice your writing in hopes of gaining knowledge or earn an extra income, you may get a little frustrated. They are sometimes difficult to find. There are content mills which pay close to nothing and blogs that require an audience to earn money. Some of you may want a simple solution such as getting credit for what you've written at a moderate or consistent pace.

In my quest for discovering this solution, I discovered LOLWOT.  This site is in direct competition with sites like Bored Panda and Buzzfeed. LolWot has a platform, fortunately, that pays per article.  When I started with the site last year, the pay was $5 for a minimum 150 word article, $5 for a video article of at least 75 words, and $2 per item for list articles with a maximum of 20 items.

This platform accepted articles that were shocking, popular, historically interesting, funny and unusual.  They pay every week on Monday as long as you have a $100 minimum in earnings.  Each completed article has to undergo an editorial approval process before you can submit another. The site claims that the approval process takes between 12 minutes and 2 hours.

My first article was a list only because it had the potential of earning $40 each. Each list item requires a high quality photo.  I discovered that you have to know a little bit about photo editing because the photos have particular size requirements. I submitted a list article for review and moved on to the news and video articles.  Once I passed the preliminary requirements, I had $50 worth of articles in the editorial review queue. 

The first set of articles were approved within 3 hours and I quickly wrote another set of each type. It seemed to be going well. Within 24 hours I had already met the minimum payout.  I noticed that the next set of articles took a considerably longer time to get approved. The following Monday was the day. Are they going to honor their word and pay? Sure enough, at 12:11am, the funds were deposited into my PayPal account. $180 was my first deposit since some of my articles were rejected. This of course got me into work mode.  I was thinking $80 per day would be a decent secondary income for doing 3 to 4 hours worth of research, writing and photo imaging.  

I started feverishly checking my email and submitting a new article within an hour or two after each approval. However, the editorial review time was getting longer and longer.  Even still, I kept churning out content. My deposits were averaging over $100 every week for a while. One particularly busy week brought in $220. However, there was no deposit the following Monday. I checked again at the end of the day and there was a notice saying that the site was having issues with PayPal.  The funds finally arrived 4 days later but it made me a little leery.

At this time the editorial review process was taking days to approve rather than hours. Again, you cannot add articles until the previous ones are approved. This slowed down my writing and cut my earnings back to less than $100 per week.

Soon, the site added a note requesting only funny articles. A few weeks later they closed submissions for lists.  Only the $5 video and articles were available. Approval time was about 9 hours. At this rate it would take more than a week to earn $100. A few months after this change, they changed the list terms to only $1.50 per item with a maximum of 15 items.

I'm sure you realize I had lost interest after the payment issues. The last time I checked, they were only accepting articles of an NSFW nature at $5 per 150 word article. In answering the question regarding the site's reputation, it is legit. The process is a little frustrating but if you're interested, go to www.cms.LolWot.com, login with your Facebook account and check it out.