Hey everyone, Misty here from Learnlegaltranscription.com and I wanted to come do this video, honestly this is the reason that made me want to start doing videos about what we offer because I’m so sad to continue seeing all of these sites and all of these people looking for work from home jobs and you’re kind of getting screwed. So I wanted to come tell you the truth, give you some things to think about when you’re looking for all of this. Let’s just dive in so I can tell you what I’m freaking talking about!
Okay so if you didn’t watch my video on billing you should go look at that, but this is what happens. Let’s start with Rev.com because they’re pretty well known and I think they’re great honestly, I’ve used them to transcribe some videos in another business that I have. They’re super quick, it’s awesome, great rates for me to do it, even though I own a transcription company. I do send a lot of stuff to our employees but for really little ones that’s really not worth their time, like five-minute videos or something I just use rev.com, not gonna lie guys.
Here’s what happens, they charge, the rates just went up, but they’ve been charging basically a dollar per minute of audio. So if I send them a five-minute audio they are charging me five dollars to have that transcribed. Easy-peasy, there you go.
If you are the one on the other end doing the transcription you are getting paid a portion of that obviously because they are the business and that’s how they stay in business. They get to keep most of the money. Most are starting around 20 cents to 30 cents per minute. So if you take a 5 minute audio from Rev you’re going to get paid a dollar to a dollar 45 or whatever that is for the math, I didn’t do it sorry about that. Now is that worth your time? You’re probably thinking well if I just type for five minutes and I get paid a dollar, you know that’s whatever, $10 an hour, or close to that. That’s not quite how that works out.
They are charging per minute of audio that is taped, now you need to know how long does it take to type that minute of audio? A general rule when we are starting our new transcribers in our business they typically type ten to twelve pages per hour, or in audio minutes that might mean it takes them about six minutes to type one minute of audio. Now I’m going to narrow this down to our average once everyone really gets going and they know templates and all about it’s about one to four. So one minute of audio will take you four minutes to type, one hour of audio will take you four hours to type. Okay one to four, so let’s go back and look at that five minute audio. It’s going to take me four times that so 20 minutes.
Now you can start figuring out your hourly rates, does it make it worthwhile? it so here’s another website scribie, I don’t know how they pronounce it. They offer people ten dollars per audio hour of work. Okay ten dollars per audio hour, not per your hour of typing, per audio hour. So you have 60 minutes of audio that you have to transcribe and they’re gonna pay you $10 total. So if you take that standard kind of rule of thumb of 1 to 4, one hour of audio is going to take you four hours to type so you’re getting paid $10 to do 4 hours of work, that comes out to $2.50 an hour. Yikes!
Now if you’re just starting and you want to see if transcription is for you,and you just want to kind of get faster and get some experience you know with getting the audios and downloading and using your foot pedal and all of that, that might be okay. As an actual job where you are paying bills, probably not so much.
So this is reality guys. There’s another website transcribeme, they offer $20 per audio hour so you’re at about $5 per hour. That’s less than minimum wage. So you really need to look at these websites and know how the math actually works out. It is not per your hour, it is per audio hour, and how long is it going to take you to type that.
Okay the other thing to consider is that they’re normally not giving you the large jobs, they’re not giving you a whole hour of audio, they’re giving you five minutes. Sometimes they’re giving you one minute of audio. So they’re basically taking a big audio and they’re shrinking it down into little teeny tiny pieces to give a lot of people work so that it seems like they have a lot of work to give you and you kind of get hooked on it. But you’re not really figuring out how much you’re actually earning per hour. If they’re giving you a 1-minute audio and you are starting and stopping because you finished that one minute audio now you got to go and get the next minute of audio, it’s actually going to take you at least twice as long as normal. So you’re talking eight hours to do a whole one hour of audio, it’s really not gonna be worth your time and that is if you can get enough work to download. So there’s a lot of people on these websites, and a lot of them are there all day long and as soon as something new comes up, they claim it. When you maybe have time to go in there, there might not be work at all.
So like I said, these are great sites if you are starting out, you really don’t want to do any extra training, you don’t have the money for a training course. Definitely research these sites, maybe try a few, it will get you some good experience doing the test. They’re all going to have a test that you do, they’ll have a style guide which is essentially how they want things transcribed, so you need to be able to follow those directions. So go through the testing process because that is important, it’s frustrating, I hear from a lot of people who say you know “I have never failed a spelling test, punctuation test or grammar test, and I cannot pass this simple little test.” Yeah I’ll probably have another video going over that but it can be frustrating, but if you’re in a situation where you just need a little bit of spending money, or you just want a little bit of experience, these sites might be great. But they are not a work from home income that you can live on, they certainly don’t have any benefits or anything like that. Can you put it on your resume? Maybe you can, I don’t know how people view as far as actual experience, certainly not for legal transcription, you do need actual experience on doing legal transcripts because they are completely different than general transcription and medical of course.
I just wanted to give you guys kind of the low down and how much, how very little, you could actually make on these websites. So drop me a comment guys, let me know any other questions you have about legal transcription. I’m going to be doing a ton of videos, so please subscribe!
