bigrag.com > Reviews (21)

Over the last few months I’ve had a few emails from “rival” sites asking me to come and write for them too. I’m not sure whether Big Rag was one of these, but somehow I ended up over there last week. When I tried to register it said that my desired user name (the ever present zoe_page) had been taken. On a whim I decided to log into the registered users area using that and my generic password, and sure enough it let me. I must have registered at some point, but I cannot for the life of me remember when. The site is similar to dooyoo or ciao in many ways – you get paid for writing an opinion on a product – but there are subtle differences.

Layout & Design

Generally ok, although the searching facilities are not really up to scratch. You can find the latest 5 articles on the site or in a category, and get a list of the most read people and most read articles. They have numerous pictures (both within ops and on the main pages) but the rest of the site is pretty standard – nice and bright though, with a purple-in-the-way-ciao-is-yellow approach

Pay Rate

This is the most tempting thing about this site in my opinion – although they do not pay you each time you are read, their payments for articles are much higher. There are 3 main tiers, bronze, silver and gold, which offer rewards at the £1, £1.25 and £1.50 level respectably. Or that is what they say. I have had various amounts from 75p to £2 depending on what I send in. the problem is, they pay varying amounts for jokes, links, articles and opinions so you can never be entirely sure. As for the Gold, Silver and Bronze thing, it is utterly subjective. I’ve had one op that was crowned on dooyoo put up as Gold, but another crowned one as bronze. Most of mine seem to be Bronze or Silver and that seems to be the case throughout the site. Some of the writers over there are great (although I recognise some familiar faces) but some are pretty cr*p too.

Sections

This site is aimed at students and this is reflected in the subject matter. Sections include travel, university, careers, going out, music and films, sport and several others. There are not, however, places to write about books (not even text books) and the controversial topics are limited to religion, terrorism and so on. You can have more than one article in a section (so under the World Guide, sub category Austria, sub-sub category Vienna for example, I have a couple) but then the categories are not that detailed - we cannot for example in a travel op, differentiate between museums, hotels, restaurants or clubs – they are all grouped under the town / city in question. Submission Details

Submissions have to be made via email. This is fine if you have Outlook Express or similar, but a pain on computers like the ones we have at UMIST where they’ve disabled it, meaning that I have to type the required details into my yahoo account time and time again.

Ratings

There are 4 standards of rating available – just like on dooyoo and ciao, although the focus is more on the writing style and humour than on how helpful / useful it is.

Community

Tough call, but from what I’ve seen there isn’t one. This is no doubt partially due to the fact that you don’t get paid for ratings or readings, so most people just don’t bother. Comments can be left but again, they are not in the majority of cases. Also, although you can trust people and see who trusts you, there’s no indication of number of comments left or pieces read/rated.

Getting Paid

Payments are by cheque once you have reached a minimum of £5 – so only five opinions. There is no handling charge but you have to answer up to 20 multiple choice questions before they will process the request on your first 20 or so redemptions. These range from “who was your favourite character in this year’s Big Brother?” to “Who did you vote for in June?”

Overall

The criteria are pretty open – you have to be 19 or over, but you don’t have to be a student, or even ever have been one. Yes, I admit it. I have posted some of my dooyoo ops over there and no, they don’t seem to care. Once I even left in the word “dooyoo-ers” by accident but they never commented, and just neatly changed it to “Big Rag–ers” before putting it up….. It’s a handy way of earning some extra money but I have a feeling it won’t last, especially if there’s an influx of new writers now after reading this and other opinions on the site. With a pay rate that high (for some relatively low quality pieces) I just cannot imagine how they will survive. I have about 20 ops over there, with 52 reads overall, and they have shelled out over £20. How can they last? I guess you should just get in there while you can :-)