At Rev, a Pattern of Low Pay and Opaque Policies

A new policy that slashes fees is the latest example of gig economy mistreatment.

By Gaby Del Valle

Unlike many of my peers in journalism, I first came to the freelance transcription service Rev as a worker instead of a client. I signed up in late 2018, a process that required an unpaid edit test, and began picking up assignments whenever I had spare time. The flexibility Rev promised seemed appealing: I didn’t have to commit to a certain number of hours or jobs per month. I quickly worked my way up from “Rookie” — an entry-level worker who, according to Rev, make an average of $30 a month — to a full-fledged “Revver.” The promotion came with a slight pay bump, but I wasn’t making enough money to keep me interested, so I abandoned my fledgling career as a freelance transcriber after two or three months.

Rev, the transcription, translation, and captioning service that launched in 2010, recently made headlines for changing the rates it pays its army of transcribers with little notice. Under the new compensation structure, Rev will pay workers more for harder files, like those with poor audio quality, and less for easier files. The company framed the change as a common-sense measure that will better compensate workers who take on more challenging projects. But Rev’s own transcribers say the company buried the new policy in a little-read internal forum — and that instead of upping the rate they make for working on harder files, Rev has actually slashed the base rate for transcription from 45 to 30 cents per minute.

Rev claims the policy change will actually “[increase] what our freelancers make for many jobs.” The transcribers who rely on Rev for work say that’s a lie, and that they’ve already lost income because of the new policy.

Writers and editors at several publications, including The New Yorker and Teen Vogue, pledged to stop using Rev until the company addressed its workers’ concerns. But even if Rev concedes and reverts to its previous rates, the company still keeps the lion’s share of the $1 per minute it charges clients. Even if the company refuses to reverse the rate cut, some Rev transcribers say they feel like they have no choice but to stick with the service because they need the money.

Founded in 2010 by two former marketing directors for the freelancing platform oDesk (oDesk merged with UpWork in 2013), Rev bills itself as one of the cheapest, fastest, and most accurate transcription services out there. “We named the company Rev because we know it’s not possible to be too fast, and so we’re doing a lot of stuff in HQ to make this faster and faster,” Rev’s CEO Jason Chicola said in a 2013 interview with Fast Company. “The bottom line is we realize it’s an enormous market and nobody was really squarely focused on it. We saw the opportunity to really turn the market upside down.”

Like every other gig economy startup, Rev classifies its more than 40,000 workers as independent contractors and describes itself as a platform instead of an employer. Despite this, Rev sets workers’ rates and requires Revvers to meet certain standards of speed and accuracy to stay on the platform. Some transcribers also work as “graders” who review transcripts for accuracy. Transcribers whose metrics fall below a certain threshold are are typically put on probation and are at risk of being booted off the platform.

Despite Rev’s claims of creating “great work from home jobs,” making a living as a Rev transcriptionist has never been easy. And with the rate cut, it’s getting even worse.

Alex, a stay-at-home mom who has been working for Rev since April, said she plans to continue working for the service for now because it’s been a more reliable platform for her than similar freelance marketplaces like Fiverr or UpWork, where rates are lower and building up a client base is harder. (She asked to be referred to by her first name to avoid reprisal from the company.) That doesn’t mean the rate change has been easy for her.

“The majority of my household income comes from my husband, but through Rev, I was covering groceries and anything my daughter needed for school, which is now a much tighter budget,” Alex said. “I went from making between $230 and $250 a week to making about $130 a week.”

Even though some transcribers feel stuck working for Rev, some of the company’s former clients are now looking for less exploitative alternatives. (Study Hall recently launched its own database of transcribers.) Li Zilles, a former Rev transcriber who wrote a viral Twitter thread about the company slashing its rates, told Study Hall that they’re now putting together their own database of former Revvers who have abandoned the company because of the new pay structure. Zilles’ hope is that clients will look through the database to find a transcriber whose expertise suits their needs — and that a database lets workers get all the money clients pay to get their files transcribed instead of half.

Eric Johnson, a producer of special projects at Recode, said he’s shifted away from Rev entirely since reading Zilles’ thread. Johnson said he sent several files to Rev each week and that he was generally happy with the speed, quality, and consistency of the work done by Rev’s transcribers, and that he had no idea how little the company paid its workforce.

“This is a general gig economy thing where you want to assume people are getting paid more than they are,” Johnson said. “I think the old [base] rate, before they lowered it, was about 45 cents on the dollar. I kind of naively assumed it would be closer to 70 cents at least.” Some files, particularly rush jobs, can net Revvers more than $1 per minute, but generally speaking, Rev pockets roughly half of what it charges its customers. Uber, for comparison, takes 25 percent.

Even before the most recent pay cuts, some transcribers were getting fed up with how little they made through Rev. Zilles says it took them a year to make a semi-livable wage of $500 a week through Rev. “Over time, I learned, ‘Okay, these are the files that I’m better at,’” they said. “I basically found ways to optimize my workflow such that I started making a rate that I was more okay with.”

Zilles’ rising wages weren’t just the result of knowing which files to choose; it was also the result of getting access to better files.

Graduating from Rookie to Revver is relatively easy; once a Rookie transcribes 60 audio minutes, they automatically move to the higher-paying level as long as their metrics are sufficient. But being promoted from Revver to Revver+, the highest tier, is more difficult. Transcribers have to complete 1,200 audio minutes while maintaining their metrics in order to get upgraded, which comes with early access to new assignments. In theory, these promotions reward those who work the hardest. But in practice, people with Revver+ status have near-exclusive access to the clearest — meaning the easiest and most lucrative — audio files.

Although Zilles gained Revver+ status, they still grew frustrated with the service. “I told myself I was fed up with it in August and came crawling back this month for a hot sec before they slashed the rates even more,” they said. “I honestly felt so ashamed that I had been on the site and put up with how little they paid for so long.”

Chicola, the Rev CEO, attempted to address his workforce’s simmering discontent in a post on the Rev forums late last week, Gizmodo reported. Among other things, he admitted Rev bungled the announcement and announced a change to the grading system that will go into effect “before February 29, 2020,” but he mostly avoided talking about the massive drop in rates. “The price increases on harder jobs and the price decreases on easier jobs are about the same when you add them up,” Chicola wrote. (When contacted for comment, a Rev spokesperson referred Study Hall to Chicola’s email to staff and to the live Q&A he had with Rev workers on November 15.)

But even before the policy change, Rev’s transcribers felt like they weren’t being fairly compensated for their work, something Zilles hopes their database will help address. But, they add, alternative transcription models won’t solve the underlying issue. These databases only fix “this specific instance of the greater problem,” Zilles said, “which is that people who want to find transcriptionists don’t necessarily know where to find them, and transcriptionists who are just starting out don’t know how to find clients.”

Alex, the stay-at-home mom, agreed the problem isn’t limited to Rev.

“I think the bigger story here is not necessarily that Rev cut their pay, but the fact that so many of these freelance sites just bank on the fact that no one can do anything about it,” she said. “They don’t think there are any repercussions and they can do whatever they want, because there’s always going to be people who need work. Always.”

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