Arbitrarily lowers wages, steals bylines, fake reviews, shady CEO - Content Creator Zippia Employee Review

1.0
Sep 5, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Not a lot of oversight or management. Freedom to experiment. Offered a 401k (but no insurance).

Cons

After a year of great work (when I was expecting a raise) and working 45 hours (expected/encouraged), the CEO decided the OT cost too much and said he was lowering my pay rate — and then asked me to work 50 hours to equal my original salary. Yes, more work and less pay. I said this didn't seem right, he said "startups usually demand extra work and it's 'the culture,' and if I didn't like it maybe it wasn't a good fit." So I quit and got a job making almost twice as much with benefits and real structure. Since I left, the co-founder has changed my name on multiple high-performing bylines to his own name — I'm still cited on the sites that quote/link to them. As for the rest of the content, it's almost all BS stuff that's churned out as clickbait. No effort at real accuracy, just content farming to try to drum up backlinks. The product itself is garbage, just scrapes job listings from other sites with little to no accuracy as far as the "AI-based" career matching... I was matched with 53 truck driving jobs and two writing internships. Arbitrarily let go three employees while I was there... kept interns on hand for extended periods of time with no actual learning, just worked them hard and paid them less (for six months) until they wanted to cut costs. Look at the other reviews... four within a week with 5 stars — can you really trust that? No room to advance, no pay increases, no equity, no professional development, no coaching.

Explore other reviews about Zippia

5.0
Nov 6, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good knowledgeable team, healthy productive enviroment

Cons

The strategy sometimes changes too rapidly

2.0
Apr 8, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Freedom and flexibility to write when you want (but for VERY little pay)

Cons

Have you ever boiled a lobster? You put him in room temperature water first. Then, you slowly turn the heat up little by little. Before he realizes what's happened, the poor guy is being boiled alive. That's what working as a freelance writer with Zippia is like. You are the lobster. You will start out with a base rate of, say, $15 an hour. This is for writing 750 words an hour at the rate of .02 cents per word. (This is BARE MINIMUM for the industry.) But, you will not be able to consistently write 750 words an hour. So, you will make closer to $10-12 an hour, depending on how little you care about the quality/content of your writing. (Zippia cares very little.) But, then the projects they send you will become increasingly more complicated, requiring more research and organization. But, your pay rate will stay the same. Before you know it, you're pulling in minimum wage to produce absolute garbage that is useful to no one -- except the serial tech entrepreneur of an owner, who is pulling in millions with this company that is essentially scamming writers and readers alike.

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