So I tried fiverr.com for essay content writing - it failed and it sucks

Ordered some not very important content writing on fiverr. Good deal, I thought at first. 5 bucks a page (or 10 if rush). It was supposed to be a simple 2 page essay on a general topic with no references. I planned to use it as informative content on my blog catering to students. So it didn't have to be 100% professional and accurate; more of an opinion kind.

They sent me paraphrased garbage. The writers took an article on the same topic available online, reshuffled it and run through some kind of text rewriting software that replaced similar words and sent it back to me. It got me angry, but I thought I'd salvage it somehow. I had extra money in my account so I found a "Level 1" editor, their best I hoped. But from our initial correspondence after I sent her writing instructions it was obvious to me the English was her or his 2nd or 4th language. So I had to cancel this time, cannot fool me twice. "Level 1" my a$$. Then I found to some other site, that only offered English text editing. I finally talked to a real US-educated person. She basically told me that for her to edit the original essay she'd have to charge me as if it was ghostwriting from scratch. Because it was that bad and illogical and made no sense overall. I ended up having her write the essay from scratch for $35 per 300 words. Never again will I use fiverr or similar cheap crap sites for content writing. Expensive in the end and it adds stress if you miss your deadline -- you always do. A 2 page simple content cost me overall $40 a page and took extra 5 days.

Those people aka "technical and article writers" who have profiles there are scammers. Maybe not the fiverr site but those who provide writing or English language editing services there. Fake flags and names. Do they check them? Maybe they are better for graphic design and computer programming but definitely not for English writing, unless you are very lucky.

Has anyone here had better success with fiverr for professional English language writing like for blog content and such? I imagine academic writing is more complex than that with all the references or tables required. I still have a few bucks left in my account and going to withdraw it tomorrow. Not using them again.

Do you have equally bad experience with them? Do students even use them, why?

I think the content available throughout this forum provides enough information to make it very clear that you're just not going to find any original content written by anybody whose first language is English for that price.

How can you seriously expect to get any quality work at such rates?


It is kind of hard to sympathize with a victim, such as yourself, who rushes in while fully aware of this forum's utility


Not unreasonable


Some of them genuinely believe they can provide the service you seek. Whether they can is a different issue altogether


I doubt it. Writers worth their salt know where to go. Lions don't scavenge where the dogs hunt.


Wise decision

From what I've noticed, a large number of the writer accounts on Fiverr are somehow associated with each other. They may work in some kind of affiliated groups which allows them to create multiple accounts and associate them with English-speaking countries to fool their prospective customers. Some of their bios strongly suggest they have been written by average ESL writers (or translated via Google translator from their native language).

Most of the accounts have 'reviews' from alleged customers, but they are either non-genuine or useless (like 'Great job writer.'). I wouldn't be surprised if these 'affiliates' placed fake orders to be able to leave positive feedbacks. All in all, below average ESL writers dominate the place and I wouldn't suggest an American or British student to consider hiring them.

@Major these companies do not have to place fake orders in order to receive fake feedback. The owners of these sites simply pay other writers, sometimes within their own company, to write positive blurbs about their company. Instructing the writer to write in the most horrific English grammar that the writer can muster so that the student will think that the company actually helps ESL students improve their writing skills. In truth, their ESL writers need help themselves. However, the horrible writing skills of their writers become a total come-on for their company because the ESL students who need writing help can't tell the difference.

Engaging their own writers to write positive reviews for their own sites, while directing them to write negative reviews for competitor sites is the way that these companies try to stay relevant and steal clients from one another. This is the best way that they know to mislead the students, making them believe that the negative site is not affiliated with them when in reality, they share a writer roster and their order listings are based on the same server.

I don't think their aim is to get the American or British students. Rather, I think that their aim is to get the ESL students instead.

@Write Review
WOW!!
You DO know a lot about how these fake companies operate. I mean, you have a deep insight of their tactics and underhanded strategies

I think the price of the writer should have tipped off the OP. It is too cheap, even for a long term, no reference paper. An article or blog costs way more than what the OP paid. The price range that was involved this time is too 3rd world in costing. It should have been a red flag. I guess she needed to hire a writer badly. Which is why she decided to try this service out. Cautionary tales always seem to end with the writer ending up being horribly cheated by the writer or a series of writers. Next time, know better. If it sounds too cheap, do not hire the writer. No writer who is truly worth the money will price his skills so low.

I get inquiries like that fairly regularly, and about half the time, it's actually from someone who asked me to provide a price quote for the project first, before opting for someone cheaper. Typically, they come back to me about a week or two later, after receiving complete garbage for their money and there's nothing remotely usable in that mess to "edit" into something decent. So after declining my services (initially), then paying someone about 50% to 75% of my original price quote for total garbage, they end up paying me to do the whole project from scratch. On about half of those occasions, by the time they contact me for help, it's a rush project due in a day or two, and in addition to paying me even more than my original quote that they declined to pay, they've also wasted whatever they paid to find out for themselves why I'm more expensive than whatever service they decided to try out first, hoping to save some money. I'd say that this exact scenario happens approximately 10 times every year.

Fiverr is fast becoming an outsourcing of the outsourced site. What I mean is, there are actually some writers who use Fiverr to create their writing teams for certain large scale company projects, which they bid on and win as an individual project, then they put together a team that will actually do the work for them. The project is supposed to be for an individual but that is not what happens. Normally the person will hire someone from a cheap labor country to assist him with the work. By assist I mean he will be paid a pittance to complete the project for the actual contract holder. So be careful when hiring someone from that freelancing site. You may not get the kind of quality that you expect.

Exactly. Sometimes, I get project inquiries asking me for a price, but when I ask some of the most basic questions that I need to know, they respond that they have to get back to me about it. The thing is, the answers to the kinds of questions I'm talking about would already be known to anybody inquiring about his own project: such as whether the project is for a history class or a writing class, for just one example. The delayed response makes it obvious to me that the person contacting me isn't the student, but someone just trying to insert himself as a middleman, hoping to represent himself as the writer, and sell my work to the customer after taking a big cut of the payment. There are numerous other giveaways that I'm not going to detail here for obvious reasons, but suffice it to say that this happens fairly often.