Charade
<font color=royalblue>I'm the one on the LEFT side
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- Jan 2, 2005
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ChaCha Offers Instant Payments to Web Workers
Topic: search
If you're a broke college student in need of some last-minute scratch for tonight's hot dinner date, ChaCha can help you out.
ChaCha.com, a site offering human-assisted guided search, is introducing an instant payment system that would offer its contracted guides the option to get compensated for their time immediately via debit cards.
Here's how it works: ChaCha guides, many of whom are college students or work-at-home moms, can sign up for a card through the First Internet Bank. Once the card is activated, the guides go to work, logging a few hours at a time and generating wages between $5 and $30 per hour. Once they're ready to cash out, the guides can dump their earnings into their debit card account and instantly spend the money. The cards work just like any other bank card, so they can be used at cash registers and ATMs.
As a search engine, ChaCha is still an experimental tool. I tested the guided search and found that it returned relevant results, but the experience was slow. The six or seven guides I interacted with didn't point me to any resources I couldn't have found using Google. However, ChaCha is expanding its pool of search guides which should make the site more useful. The site launched the first week of September and currently has 2000 guides in training. Another 5000 guides are being introduced to the system. ChaCha got some positive coverage in USA Today when it launched.
Even if the search tool doesn't excite you, the instant payment system should. It signals a step forward for the thousands who make their living, or even just their spending money, on the web. ChaCha founder Scott A. Jones calls this new breed of web worker the "internet day laborer." They have the ability to get paid instantly for a day's -- or a few hours' -- work.
ChaCha's experiment of paying the work-at-home guides to build a better search tool is part of a broader trend to turn the collective wisdom of crowds into hard cash. Social news site Netscape.com is paying its top users up to $1000 per month to submit stories. The new Yahoo Current Network, which I wrote about yesterday, rewards users who submit videos with a $100 payout. Lensmasters at Squidoo.com get a share of the profits generated by ad sales on their expert opinion pages.
There's also a nation of AdSense devotees out there who earn hundreds of dollars per month simply by running Google-powered text ads on their sites and blogs.
Can this new crop of freelance experts re-write the playbook for earning money on the web? If you're one of those experts who makes a living sharing your knowledge and expertise, tell us your story.
Topic: search
If you're a broke college student in need of some last-minute scratch for tonight's hot dinner date, ChaCha can help you out.
ChaCha.com, a site offering human-assisted guided search, is introducing an instant payment system that would offer its contracted guides the option to get compensated for their time immediately via debit cards.
Here's how it works: ChaCha guides, many of whom are college students or work-at-home moms, can sign up for a card through the First Internet Bank. Once the card is activated, the guides go to work, logging a few hours at a time and generating wages between $5 and $30 per hour. Once they're ready to cash out, the guides can dump their earnings into their debit card account and instantly spend the money. The cards work just like any other bank card, so they can be used at cash registers and ATMs.
As a search engine, ChaCha is still an experimental tool. I tested the guided search and found that it returned relevant results, but the experience was slow. The six or seven guides I interacted with didn't point me to any resources I couldn't have found using Google. However, ChaCha is expanding its pool of search guides which should make the site more useful. The site launched the first week of September and currently has 2000 guides in training. Another 5000 guides are being introduced to the system. ChaCha got some positive coverage in USA Today when it launched.
Even if the search tool doesn't excite you, the instant payment system should. It signals a step forward for the thousands who make their living, or even just their spending money, on the web. ChaCha founder Scott A. Jones calls this new breed of web worker the "internet day laborer." They have the ability to get paid instantly for a day's -- or a few hours' -- work.
ChaCha's experiment of paying the work-at-home guides to build a better search tool is part of a broader trend to turn the collective wisdom of crowds into hard cash. Social news site Netscape.com is paying its top users up to $1000 per month to submit stories. The new Yahoo Current Network, which I wrote about yesterday, rewards users who submit videos with a $100 payout. Lensmasters at Squidoo.com get a share of the profits generated by ad sales on their expert opinion pages.
There's also a nation of AdSense devotees out there who earn hundreds of dollars per month simply by running Google-powered text ads on their sites and blogs.
Can this new crop of freelance experts re-write the playbook for earning money on the web? If you're one of those experts who makes a living sharing your knowledge and expertise, tell us your story.
