HireWriters Review – A No Refund Money Grabbing Scam – Stay Away!!!

HireWriters Deposit Scam

A lot of people have blogged about HireWriters, an online writing service for clients who need content produced for them. The online company recruits writers from western English speaking countries such as USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and even Singapore. A lot has been said about the company and most of the reviews are not so glowing. There are a lot of complaints from both clients and writers. However, in this article, I am going to dwell on client opinions. I decided to join the service as a client to check out the quality of articles produced by HireWriters as well as the customer service. Here is my review:

So HireWriters requires an initial deposit of $10 to get started with your project. After signing up for a client account, I paid the deposit via PayPal and then went on to create my first project. I gave clear instructions to the writer, stating the article requirements as well as tips and ideas to help the writer. I posted my project on a weekend (Saturday) and within 24 hours it was claimed and completed the following morning.

Bad Writers

Upon reviewing the article, a short post, it was clear that the article was written by somebody with no English writing skills. There are many writers who speak English as a second language, who can write better than native English speakers, that’s why I don’t like accusing bad writers of being non-native English speakers. In this case, the writer was a native English speaker or maybe she was cheating the system - using a US proxy or she was a non-native resident of the USA. Such scenarios are possible and cannot be ruled out on an internet-based platform.

The article produced by this writer was not something you would expect from somebody who calls herself a writer. If you call yourself a writer, then you have to produce a standard quality which is way above a regular person who doesn’t claim to be a writer. It doesn’t matter if you are writing for money, fun or as a hobby, you have to produce a minimum standard that puts you above an average writer.

The poorly written article had no introduction, no flow and no paragraphs. It looked like a series of statements that were bungled together to create a post. Patiently, I immediately ordered a revision with clear instructions and guidelines. I gave the writer 2 days to work on the article but it was not all smooth.

Poor User Interface

First, I had to contend with the website’s poor user interface and functionality. The revision was submitted but HireWriters didn’t save nor send my Employer feedback. The writer messaged me about this, and I had to re-write and send the feedback to her via the messaging system. When the deadline approached, I was expecting the revision to be completed, but as the deadline passed, it was clear that the writer had not bothered to work on the revisions. At this point, I decided I had enough. I was going to cancel all projects and get my money back.

No Refund - Tricks To Keep Your Money, Forced Service, Shady Support Staff and Poor Customer Service

To my surprise, I found out that HireWriters had secretly given my project to another writer and the deadline was increased without my consent. I sent a ticket to get my refund – to withdraw the remaining balance back to my PayPal account, but support staff did not reply me. That’s when I started searching the internet to find out about their Refund Policy and it turns out they don’t refund clients. If I had done my research before joining this service, I was not going to use them. HireWriters never replies to requests for refund, they just go dead quiet.Two tickets were opened and they never bothered to reply as they do when you are a new customer.Fortunately,I paid with PayPal, so they will not be able to get away with my money:

HireWriters Doesn't Reply When You Request a Refund

HireWriters forces you to deposit an initial deposit of $10 that you will never get refunded nor withdraw from your account. That means if you deposit a lot of money e.g. $200, you will never get it back. They also prolong your projects without your permission, changing the deadline and forcing you to use their writers when you are no longer interested in their service. So you are basically stuck with them until your deposit is depleted.

All prospective clients who are planning to use this service must think twice – the quality of articles is low, there are no refunds. Once you put some funds, you won’t get them out and your project deadlines are not respected.

Founders of Spoutable Ad Network Are Also Behind the $2.2 Million Funded Cursive Labs

Company Profile

Spoutable was founded in 2014 by three co-founders Evan White, Keiran Flanigan and Jon Belmonte. The company’s headquarters are based in San Diego, California, USA. It’s an Ad Network with a focus on new generation Ads called Native Ads. Their Ads are developed to integrate perfectly and smoothly with the user’s intent as they decide to leave a page. This is achieved by providing recommended content that a user is more likely to consume when they leave. The natural free flow of traffic on the site is respected and not interfered with in any way, neither does the user meet landing pages disguised as content.

Another element brought by the design team is the premium quality and presentation of recommended posts that is intended to fit in with content.

Last but not least is the continuous optimization of Ad zones and Ads to improve CTRs for advertisers and increase CPMs for publishers.

The Founders of Spoutable are the team behind another reputable company – Cursive Labs, a firm that specializes in startup incubation. Cursive Labs has raised over 2.2 million USD to grow and expand tech startups.

Offices

Cursive Labs Headquarters

3051 Broadway,

San Diego,

CA 92102,

USA

Regional Offices – Chicago, New York, Los Angeles

Spoutable Management Team

• MD, Co-Founder – Jon Belmonte
• MD – Ryan Bettencourt
• GM – Grant Bosttrom
• Head of Creatives, Co-Founder – Keiran Flanigan
• Head of Partner Success, Co-Founder – Evan Witte

Twitter Profile - https://twitter.com/spoutable

DataFox Profile –  https://datafox.com/spoutable

CrunchBase Profile - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/spoutable

3 Types of Native Ads Offered By Spoutable

Spoutable Ad Units

If you are wondering how Native Ads by Spoutable look like on your website, then this article will assist you in getting an idea.Spoutable Ads are premium Ads that don’t look like ordinary Ads. If you are familiar with popular websites that receive millions of page views per month, you may have noticed Ads that look different from smaller websites. Big websites are often given a privilege to customize their Ads to increase click-through rates and conversions. These Ads are very effective because they are designed not to look like Ads so they are more likely to be viewed. Advertising technology experts believe that Native Ads are the future of advertising. The principle is that an Ad should not look like an Ad but it should be accepted as part of the content and it should be relevant or at least engaging to the audience that it comes in contact with.

This is what Native Ads are all about, engaging visitors and helping them find related content that might be of interest to them. The most important aspect is that Ads should not get in the way of visitors but instead they should provide a positive experience.

Spoutable Ads can integrate smoothly and harmoniously with any website. When the user decides to exit a page, they go in sync with the user’s intent of discovering interesting content. They are perfectly designed to fit in with a website because they are not Ads. The user goes from content to content, consuming nothing but content. The consumer will never meet a banner or billboard that stands in the way of natural navigation and exploration.

Currently, there are three types of Native Ads that can be activated by the publisher and optimized by the company’s advertising technology to increase earnings.

Interstitial Ads

Also called Overlay Ads, these are not your usual interstitials that block your way with a large banner or screaming billboard. Instead, they are Native Ads in the form of recommended posts. When people visit a non-commerce website, they are not looking to buy something but they are looking for content to consume. This is true for news, entertainment, technology and information websites. A recommended post is something that readers will appreciate and a display banner is something that people will frown at.

Horizontal Bars

Horizontal bars are a creative way to show recommended posts. Once again these are not banners or text ads that take you to a promotional landing page, but they take you to another post that you might be interested in. There are two types of bars offered by Spoutable, the top and bottom bars. The sponsored posts on these bars are shown with a title and thumbnail image or as a row of images.

Top Horizontal Bar

Bottom Horizontal Bar

Sign Up >> Publisher Account

How to Install Spoutable Ads on Your Website and Start Making Money

Spoutable Ad Integration 

If you have dabbled with many Ad Networks, one of the things that takes a little of your precious time is installing the Ad Code and getting it to work on your website. Most Ad Networks require you to add more than one piece of code, and in some cases the code won’t work on a specific platform without doing alterations.

Spoutable Ads are one of the easiest to integrate on your website. In less than 3 minutes, your Ads will start showing after adding one piece of code on your website. Everything about Spoutable is fast and smooth. As soon as you sign up for a Publisher Account, you can sign into your dashboard and get the only code that you are required to install on your site to begin showing Native Ads.

I have installed the Ads on both BlogSpot and Wordpress with ease. BlogSpot is often a problematic platform when it comes to installing third party code, but I encountered no problem in installing Spoutable code.

Here is a step by step procedure of installing Spoutable Native Ads on your website:

First you must sign up with the Ad Network. You will be get instant access to a single account, which contains both the Publisher and Advertiser account. Switch to the Publisher account by clicking the tab on the far right of the top navigation. While anybody can open a Publisher account instantly with no minimum traffic requirements, you have to wait for the support team to approve your websites. While you are logged into your account, click the Manage tab on the far left of the top navigation to grab some code of one of your websites.

Navigation Menu

When you scroll down, you should see a list of websites that have been approved by the support team. Note that you can’t use code that has been assigned to a specific website on another website. You have to go to each website on the list and grab the Embed Code assigned to that website.

To install the code on a BlogSpot blog, log into your Blogger account, click Template on the left sidebar, then select Edit HTML, scroll down to the footer where you can see the closing body tag. Paste the code just above the closing body tag and click Save to enforce changes.

Paste Code Above Closing Body Tag - Blogspot.com

Get Ad Code - Spoutable

Visit your Blogger website and you should see interstitial Native Ads showing on your site.

To install the code on a self-hosted Wordpress site, log into your Admin account and install a plugin to insert Ad code on your website. There are many plugins that can do this. You should insert the code on the footer, so open your plugin settings page and paste the Ad code in the footer section.

Visit your Wordpress site and you should see overlay Native Ads showing on your blog.

The Native Ads by Spoutable show up instantly. As soon as the Ads are installed, the company’s Ad Optimization technology begins to work, gathering data about your Ad Zones and optimizing them. You don’t need to do anything to initiate optimization. It happens quietly from the company’s ad servers. This feature is an added benefit for publishers who use the network. It does not only increase the publisher’s earnings but it also gives useful information to advertisers about profitable zones on your website so that they can compete for the spot. It’s a 50/50 situation that benefits both parties.

Manage Zones

If you want to select your own Ad zones for a specific website, click Manage on the far left of the top navigation, select a website that you want to configure, click Zones and you will see all types of Ad Units that can be optimized. There are overlays and horizontal bars (top and bottom).Slide the button to the right to choose the Self-Select option. This allows you to manually choose your Ad zones, but optimization is not disabled for manually selected zones. Manual selection gives you the freedom to choose placements on your website.

Spoutable continually tracks the performance of Ads and zones on your website. To check progress, click the Track tab on the extreme left of the top navigation. As the machine gathers data and learns about behaviors on your website, it will help you discover the highest paying spots on your site.

Sign Up For Spoutable Now

Testing Spoutable Native Ads – Earnings Potential and Performance Results after 4 Days

Spoutable vs. Engageya, AyBoll, Limk, Adstract, Adsense and Propeller

When I first encountered Spoutable Ads on a popular entertainment site, I knew that they are premium Ads by their look and feel. You just can’t resist testing these kind of Ads. If you are a publisher who has tried several Ad Networks, with time you get a sense of what works and what won’t work on your site just by looking at the Ads without needing to sign up. However, Spoutable was not going to be on the list of Ad Networks that was to be waved away. One look at the native ads, followed by a minute or so of appreciation led me to sign up instantly.

Spoutable Overlay and Horizontal Bar

Immediately after signing up, you get access to the dashboard where you can get Embed Code to put on your website, meanwhile your sites will be approved within a day or two of signing up. When your sites are approved, the team will email you some special embed code for each of your websites. If you have already obtained the code from the dashboard, you don’t need to do anything further.

Advertising Technology

Spoutable uses a proprietary Advertising technology that starts collecting data for optimizing Ads on each of your websites. If you want to benefit from this advanced optimization system, then you should leave your Ad Zones in the default setting for the intelligent machine to determine the best plan that will increase your earnings. You can also manually choose Ad Zones which are suitable for your site and the system will optimize Ads in your selected zones.

Spoutable offers 3 types of Native Ads formats. These are the Overlay (Interstitial Ads), Top and Bottom Horizontal Bars. It seems the company’s goal is perfecting Native Ads and taking them to a higher level than what you are used to. Their creative ad types in conjunction with a unique ad-serving method helps publishers to realize higher earnings and advertisers to get higher Click-through rates.

When you sign up for a Publisher Account, you can also get an Advertiser Account at the same time using the same login. Switching between both accounts is quite easy. Simply click the appropriate tab and you will be taken over to the appropriate dashboard.

Earnings Results after 4 Days.

After 4 days of using Spoutable with the default Zone optimization setting, here is how the company performed against other ad networks. Note that the metric used for comparison is earnings per day because Ad Networks have different ways of counting daily views. The actual figures earned in US Dollars have been converted into ratios for illustration:

1. Native Ad Providers – Here, daily earnings were compared against similar advertising networks like Limk, AyBoll and Engageya.Spoutable performed at least 50 times better than the combined earnings of these three ad networks. One observation here is that it is difficult to earn money with traditional native ads unless you have millions of page views a month. That’s why it’s important to find a company with an innovative and creative approach to native-ad deployment and placement.Spoutable Ads have a higher CTR compared to other networks.
2. Interstitial and Pop-Up Ad Providers – Here, the average daily earnings from pop-ups and overlays served by Propeller, Adstract and Clicksor are compared against Spoutable.Again Spoutable outperforms these three companies by an infinitely large margin. Actually, there is no comparison because these companies generated zero dollars for something like 2000 views a day.
3. Banner Ad Providers – In this case, daily earnings were compared against Adstract Banner Ads. Earnings from Adstract Banner Ads were more or less a match with Spoutable native ads.

Do Spoutable Native Ads Affect Performance of Other Ad Networks?

Another observation which I set out to find is whether Spoutable Ads affect the performance of other Ad Networks like Adsense and Adstract.

After 4 days of testing, I realized that earnings from other Ad Networks were not affected by Spoutable Native Ads. The earnings were consistent with or without Spoutable, so Spoutable definitely adds an extra income stream on top of your existing streams. According to my observations, if you earn (Y) Dollars a day from Adstract Banner Ads, Spoutable will add approximately (Y) Dollars on top, and if you earn (Z) Dollars a day with Adsense, Spoutable will add approximately (Z x 0.25) Dollars on top.

How Spoutable is Different from Other Native Ad Providers

Spoutable has an innovative approach to native ads which are also known as recommended posts or sponsored posts. If you have ever noticed recommendations from popular companies like Outbrain, Taboola, AyBoll, Engageya, RevContent and Disqus, they have one thing in common – they all look too familiar, boring, unimaginative and you expect them at the bottom of the post.

Recommended Posts from Spoutable are not only placed at strategic positions that go with the visitor’s flow on the site, but they are appealing and good to experience them.

The company has a new type of Ad called Overlay Native Ads, which appears on exit and entry points of a website. They are not your usual interstitial ads which consist of a huge billboard or giant banner, but they are premium recommended posts which feel like part of the content.

The company has also integrated recommended posts into horizontal bars that appear at the top and bottom of the screen. Visitors can easily close the bars by clicking a corner button.

To give appeal to recommended posts, the Ads are carefully designed - high resolution featured images and easy text that is enjoyable to read. The recommendations are also shown without text, as a row of pictures.

While the ads have a premium edge and creative deployment that attracts clicks and knocks out the ordinary look of most Native Ads, another important thing that blows away the competition is the ongoing Optimization that takes place in the background while you do nothing. Whatever option you choose to select Ad zones – default or manual selection, Spoutable deploys its machine-learning system to gather data and optimize your zones for better performance. After a substantial amount of data is gathered, your earnings will skyrocket as the machine learns.Spoutable is the only company with this type of advantage for publishers and advertisers. We all know that optimizing Ads can take a lot of the publisher’s time which should rather be spent in generating content.Spoutable does optimization for the publisher FREE using their in-house technology. Sign Up For Spoutable Now >> CLICK HERE

Spoutable Ads Are a Class of its Own – Appealing, Impressive and Practical Ads

I discovered Spoutable Ads by chance when I stumbled upon an online magazine called BoMagazine.com on the internet. I can’t remember what I was searching for but a Google keyword search led me to the site. What caught my eye even before I browsed the site was the nice and impressive interstitial ads in front of me in the form of native ads. Now I have seen native ads (e.g. RevContent, Taboola, Ayboll) on thousands of websites but they are nowhere close to the appeal of Spoutable Ads.

Interstitial Native Ads - Entry Point

Whoever is behind the design of Spoutable Ads took some time to produce something that is aesthetically pleasing to the eye, not an eyesore that you are used to on other sites. They say native ads are the future because they don’t distract the user and they are not affected by “banner blindness” – literally, a phenomenon where website visitors ignore Ads due to the fact that they get used to them and therefore learn not to click anything that looks like an Ad. However, when you are a regular visitor to a specific site that uses native ads, for example an entertainment site, you will begin to notice that most recommendations or related posts are actually links to sponsored sites. Next time when you visit the site, you will learn not to click the recommended posts, especially the hyped ones, so I think native ads are also affected to some extent by “banner blindness” which you might call native ads blindness in this case.

Why do people ignore native ads? There are many reasons why people will ignore recommended posts:

Aesthetic Appeal

One of the reasons why people ignore native Ads is that they are not appealing. You can blame this on the Ad Network that doesn’t put much effort in this department. Native ads are not banners that are self-designed by the advertiser, so the task of presentation is left to the Adnetwork as well as the technology that the adnetwork uses. The advertiser has no control over presentation except for the featured image that is used in the recommended post.

Top Horizontal Bar Native Ads

Blending and Harmony

You may have noticed and ignored a recommended post because it didn’t look the part. These are ads that don’t blend well with your theme or they are just not sophisticated enough to avoid shouting out “hey I am a sponsored ad”. Sponsored ads should not be easily detected apart from native content but they should look like a part of the family or some welcome guest.

Font and Size

Whether you believe it or not, the type of font that is used in an Ad can affect the reaction of visitors to the site. It is the designer’s goal to experiment with font that is easy on the eyes, something not too harsh, not attention-seeking, not too big but definitely not too small, not eye-straining nor weak. If you are turned off by extraordinary font or struggling to read a word, then the designer has failed to meet the objectives of a good Ad.

Bottom Horizontal Bar Native Ads

Color

The type of color that is used in an Ad presentation can affect the viewer in ways that you would never think of. Just like font, colors must be easy on the eyes. Colors should not be a turn-off, they shouldn’t distract or dazzle the users. Neither should they be somber, gloomy nor boring.

Ad Serving Technology

Adserving technology plays a huge role in influencing the behavior of Ads as well as the behavior of the person interacting with the Ad. If a company understands the power of Adservers, then they will not rely on third party servers which are owned by outsiders but they will develop their own proprietary adserving technology that will change the game in the industry. Conversion rates depend on a lot of factors, some which are dependent on the advertiser’s copy, but in some cases, it is the adserving technology that makes the difference. A powerful adserver will give a positive experience to both the advertiser and publisher.

Creativity

Companies which move ahead are the creative ones. Creativity in the adserving process, design and presentation will determine the reputation of an Ad Network.If Ads bring a positive experience to users and desired results to both advertiser and publisher, then the company is moving in the right direction. In this case, creativity should be focused on maximizing returns for advertisers, maintaining high CPMs for publishers and pleasing site visitors with Ads that are in sync with their intents. It’s not only intents that matter but people should fall in love with the creative interaction that is smooth, amazing, unobstructive and compatible.

To sign up for Spoutable Ads as a Publisher or Advertiser, Click Here >> SIGN UP

Spoutable Ads have one of the fastest approval process. Soon after signing up, you can start using their code which they will send to your email.