Vantaggi
I liked that this job allowed me to make money from the comfort of my own home. I've seen others complain about how long and complicated the TranscribeMe style guide is, but I found it pretty intuitive for the most part and quite liked that they clarified what you should do in so many different situations. Most of it is quite similar to the writing conventions I learned when working on my history degree. If you're familiar with Chicago style, their style guide will be familiar. The community on their forums was helpful and there are opportunities for advancement, but ...
Svantaggi
The pay was quite low compared to other transcription sites and only increases a little bit once you pass their extra tests. Additionally, there's rarely work available if you haven't passed those tests. You have to sit there with an autorefresh add-on refreshing their page constantly to get work at all, and once you do get work, you'll often find that the audio quality is just terrible. For general transcription, they don't allow you to choose which file you'd like to work on. The file just starts playing, and if you throw a few files back in a row because you don't want to work on them, you'll get booted from the queue for a few minutes. The queue doesn't care if you've already rejected a file once (or twice or three times) before. Sometimes, it'll just keep giving you the same one again and again. TranscribeMe uses a 2-step system where transcribers transcribe short clips of a longer file, and then a QA goes over the whole file to ensure it's consistent and client-ready. I would say this is usually a good thing for the client, but it's also part of why the pay is so low, since TM has to pay 2 people to go over the same file (although First Draft and QuickStep files that are supposedly client-ready still only pay a few cents/minute more). TranscribeMe requires you to have $20.00 in your account to get paid out, and you'll only get paid for your work after it's been QAed. QAs DO get to choose which files they want to work on, and it can sometimes take weeks for a file to clear (since QAs like good audio just as much as transcribers do). I spent over a month waiting for a 4 minute file I did on my first day at TM to clear, and I actually had to keep doing the occasional file here and there after I'd already decided I didn't want to keep working with TM because I didn't want them to deactivate my account for inactivity before I could withdraw all my money. On the transcription site I use now, I've never seen a file sit for more than a few days, let alone an entire month, and I think it's ridiculous that a client would have to wait so long to get their transcription back. This is a more minor complaint, but I'm also really not fond of their editor. If you don't have a foot pedal (which I didn't at first), you'll have to pause by using a keyboard shortcut made up of Ctrl+[some other key]. I found this caused a lot of pain in my hand to have to do repeatedly. I really like to use text expanders to make things go quicker and to reduce stress on my hands, and the TM editor does have the ability to add them (they call them "snippets"), but I had two problems with using them: 1) half of the time they didn't actually expand and I'd have to go back through and type the whole words out anyway, which was actually slower than just typing it out all the way in the first place, and 2) their editor could not always distinguish between a single character sitting by itself and a character that was part of another word. For example, my expander for "the," which works fine on Rev, is "t". Can't use it on TM because any contraction that ends with 't would expand into 'the.