There's a good chance you've heard of a new search engine, up-and-coming in the extremely competitive industry, called ChaCha. If you've used it, you probably did a search for "sex," got banned, and went back to Google. That was, in my experience, the most common type of search. Not too many people used ChaCha seriously, and I can't blame them. It's really only good for if you're completely lost trying to search for something you have no clue about.
For the most part, though, the only thing ChaCha is good for is pranking.
ChaCha recruited guides, promising such things as earnings of up to $10 an hour, a network that would pay back dividends, and the opportunity for advancement. After months working with ChaCha, though, it's becoming apparent that all ChaCha offers its guide is the chance to make meager sums of money and what amounts to almost a game of actually getting that money sent to you.
5. Sub-Minimum Wage
The hypothetical “minimum wage” paid by ChaCha, before accounting for lost time, is $5.00 an hour. This is below the federal minimum wage and well below some state’s minimum wages.
I've yet to hear an explanation from anyone on how ChaCha can, legally, pay a sub-minimum wage to its workers. Even waitresses are paid minimum wage is the money is not made up in tips. And if there is some legal way ChaCha does this, as there really must be, it is certainly not any wage that is reasonable, as I will elaborate on later.
While ChaCha, by its own official terms, pays less than minimum wage, “Lost time,” makes it much less than that. Lost time is the time a guide will spend searching over the allotted time for which ChaCha has agreed to pay you. That is, you’re only getting paid for the first six minutes.
This amount of time is, currently, six minutes, meaning the most you can make on any one ChaCha search is $.50.
Search for six minutes to find information on “Lost Mayan ruins?” You earn fifty cents. Search for ten minutes to find information on “Captain Kangaroos childhood?” You earn fifty cents. Search for twenty minutes to find information on “Biomechanics and Nuclear theory?” You earn fifty cents. Oh, and don’t think about transferring that search to someone else. Transferring 20% or more of your searches will earn you a deactivation.
A person can easily do an hour and a half of work before making that five dollars that is ChaCha’s “hourly wage.” Any other business that paid its employees ten dollars for three hours of work would be shut down immediately.
When I started working for ChaCha, the time allotment was ten minutes, meaning the most money you could earn on one search was 83 cents. In February that time was rolled back to six minutes, making that amount 50 cents.
4. Invite Deactivation
One of the main selling points of ChaCha is the possibility that a guide can earn invites that he can use to bring other people to ChaCha and then earn 10% of the money they make searching and training. However, as of this week guide invitation is deactivated with no time scheduled for its return, robbing ChaCha guides of another source of income.
However, on ChaCha.com’s main page, there’s still a link on how to “become a guide,” where you’re told you can earn “$5-10 per hour of search” (more on that ten dollars later) and telling you that you can “Climb to the top of the ChaCha Guide rankings and build your ChaCha Network to maximize your success.”
That's not all, though. As a ChaCha guide, I get paid not only for providing searches, but also for training other ChaCha guides how to give accurate search results themselves. Most of these trainees were people new to the ChaCha system, and a good portion, some days more than half, of my money came from training other upstart ChaCha guides. With invite deactivation, though, training sessions have stagnated and I’ve lost another important source of revenue necessary to reach the monthly requirement of $100 (see: Pay me Monthly).
3. "Elite" Pay
ChaCha guides train on keywords they choose that pertain to their areas of interest, the hope being that after getting enough searches on that keyword with positive results, they will reach “elite” status with it.
Elite status was different when ChaCha was first released, Guides could reach a level known as “elite,” the highest level, at which a guide earned ten dollars an hour on all searches, though with the same restrictions on time spent on one search. However, this was changed quickly, so that soon one could only become elite on certain keywords, instead of as an overall level.
Unfortunately, keywords are inherently more vague than what searchers typically search for. For example, I might train on “basketball,” but few if any users search with the vague term “basketball.” They’s search for “the Detroit Pistons” or “NBA trade deadline” but very rarely for “basketball.” Furthermore, if someone searches for “basketball shorts,” that is not recorded as being a search for your keyword. It must be a search done exactly as your keyword appears.
ChaCha advertises to potential Guides that they can make up to Ten dollars an hour. In reality, this is the process that would have to go down for me to earn ten dollars an hour:
- I would need to train on a keyword, let’s say it’s “fishing,” being trained by other ChaCha guides until I reach “pro” status on this keyword.
- I would be trained by more ChaCha guides on the keyword “fishing” until I reach the “master” level on that keyword.
- To promote to “elite” level, I am no longer trained by ChaCha guides. I have to receive it as a search from an actual user. And it must be the exact term “fishing,” and not “fishing reels” or “how to fish,” or any other variation. If I got enough of these searches, and got great ratings on all of then, I would finally promote to elite.
- Then, to earn ten dollars an hour, I would need to receive a search for the exact term “fishing” at, let’s say, 1:00. It would need to last exactly 6 minutes, to avoid Lost time that I am not paid for, and then after I ended it I would need to immediately get another search for “fishing,” which lasts exactly six minutes, and so on like this for an entire hour.
This is too far beyond impossible to happen that it’s not even worth mentioning. I am currently “elite” level on four keywords. I get a search for one of those four once every other day.
2. Threats
Not unlike most companies, ChaCha does not hold back in threatening punishments for bad behavior on the job. It’s expected of companies to be able to wield that threat as a whip to drive its employees not to slack off and to work harder. However, in most cases the term are more clearly defined, and warning are certainly given first. ChaCha’s deactivation policy allows no personal warning, and while most reasons for deactivation are reasonable (sending porn to users, berating users, so on,) two stick out as being a little fishy.
-Getting banished from the Forum
Wait, I can get fired for being banned from the forums? So if I take my complaints to the forum I run the risk of being banned and deactivated? Granted, I don’t know that posting my long rant about all the ways ChaCha has cheated me will get my post deleted and myself banned, but I do know that I’ve never seen a post like it on there.
-Transferring more than 20% of searches to another Guide
This one is bothersome because the way you accept searches, a little box pops up on your screen that, paraphrasing, basically says “Would you like to help find information on _________” followed by accept or decline buttons. ChaCha strongly encourages users to only accept searches they can give good results in, which is the entire points of the keyword system, but if I’m chatting on AIM, that box pops up and 90% of the time I immediately hit “accept” just because I’m typing at the time. At least half of my accepted searches come accidentally, this way.
Now I have to make the decision to either transfer the search and risk getting closer to that magic number of deactivation, or search for something I know nothing about and likely will give bad results for, both of which further the likelihood of my being deactivated.
1. Try and get your money!
There are only two ways to actually get your money from ChaCha, and the one that is slightly more direct is the “Pay me now” option. I didn’t opt for the Pay Me Now option, so I can only speak by what ChaCha itself says and from the problems I hear at the ChaCha.com forums.
In order to have ChaCha Pay You Now, you need to create an entirely new bank account. This bank account is with the First Internet Bank of Indiana. They then send you a debit card in the mail (however long that takes). Then you, at any time, at the cost of two dollars, can have ChaCha place your earnings onto that debit card. What other business charges you to get your money?
It seems that something like PayPal is too complicated for ChaCha, because the only other way to receive your earnings is a monthly deposit into your existing checking account. No checking account? They’ll point you to the First Internet Bank of Indiana, then.
It sounds simple. All you have to do is give ChaCha your bank information and fax them a voided check to verify your bank account. Then you have the pleasure of being paid once a month, on the very specific day of “after the 15th.” My first time paid by this method, I finally actually had the money in my bank account on the 21st.
When ChaCha's system didn't recognize my Social Security number, a common problem according to the forums, I had to wait a week to get a response from technical support, giving me a number I could fax my form to. After that, another few days for them to enter it into the system. Then I was able to set up my bank account and, after faxing a voided deposit slip. All done, the process took roughly three weeks. Three weeks of tech support, faxing documents, waiting, and more faxing, just to actually be able to receive the money. All the while, ChaCha is letting me do searches and "earn" money. If at any time a complication arises, or I decide not to go through with being a ChaCha guide, that money is never paid to me.
What’s notable, though, is that if you do not have one hundred dollars earned, ChaCha simply won’t give it to you. They keep it. The end. Only earn fifty bucks this month because you were too busy, I don’t know, studying or something? Well, you can’t have it. Did you only have $96.43 earned at the end of the month? Oh, tough break. You’ll have to earn $3.57 more and wait another month, then you can have it. Were you just at $74.83 when ChaCha decided to deactivate you because you lost it after the 8,000th search for “mudkipz?” Well it seems like that’s money you’re never getting, seeing as how you can’t earn the requisite one hundred.
Under the most recent changes to ChaCha's payment standards, I would need to dedicate about four hours every night to ChaCha in order to make the one hundred dollars necessary to be paid that month. To make the $200 monthly I was hoping to be able to put towards college I would have to make myself available to ChaCha for up to eight hours or more nightly.
Considering these two difficult methods for actually getting the money you’ve earned under ChaCha’s own terms, I have to wonder how much is simply left unpaid entirely.
They’re basically just lying dicks
And you couldn’t put it much simpler. ChaCha outright lies to potential guides about the money that could be potentially made. ChaCha ritualistically rolls back the pay and benefits of its current guides. ChaCha practically steals money already earned by guides with convoluted payment systems and arbitrary rules such as the one hundred dollars necessary for a deposit, and even has the ability to deactivate a guide with less than one hundred dollars earned so that they will not be obligated to pay him anything of what he has already earned.
So what do we do?
I’d tell you not to use ChaCha, but the likelihood is that you’re already well ahead of me. I’d suggest an onslaught of pranks, but the only people those really affect are the poor guides who have already been taken horrible advantage of by ChaCha, who would make ad revenue on the searches anyway. So what am I asking?
Send them an e-mail. Let them know you won’t be using ChaCha and you will make sure to tell your friends about the evils of ChaCha until its guides are treated and paid fairly.
Stop pranking them. They still get ad revenue money and the forum threads dedicated to it only gives ChaCha more free exposure.
And for the love of God, don't let you or anyone you know become a ChaCha guide.
