19 Oct 2022
Kibin Reviews
4.3
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Reviews by job title
2 reviews
2.0
20 May 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook
Pros
Kibin is one of the many proofreading mills offering its services on the web. The benefit is that you get to take the work you want and leave what you don’t want (when the work is there). All the editors are vetted carefully and know their stuff. The managing editors and owner are kind, and it was always fun to chat daily with other editors and listen to silly banter and inside jokes. There is a friendly competition that allows you to get a small monetary bonus if you rank onto the Leader Board. It might still be there. In terms of editing/proofreading mills, it could certainly be worse. They do care about making their customers happy, and I heard they even offered a scholarship at one point.
Cons
Despite the nice people, the company’s structure is illogical. Kibin must be scared that its editors will poach clients. Why else would the infrastructure be built in such a way that you cannot directly contact the client except through the managing editors? I never even knew whether my writer was male or female. Clients can only leave limited instructions for what they want edited, like grammar, punctuation, flow, etc. Alas, they don’t have enough room to specify what they wanted exactly, so half the time it was a guessing game. If you guessed right, the client would (hopefully) leave good feedback. If you guessed incorrectly (‘cause you’re an editor, and not a mind reader), the client would get pissed off and leave negative feedback. It doesn’t do any good to refute it because even if you are right, the negative feedback remains for all to see. I suspect this is a purposeful tactic because you are paid based on the amount of positive and negative feedback you acquire. Speaking of payment, you will never get paid more than a little over a cent per word. In comparison, an editor with one year of experience should be paid about three cents a word. I know Kibin has to cover marketing costs, hosting, development, etc., but ultimately, it’s the editors providing the actual services that keep clients coming back, and not the pretty graphics or blog posts. To break it down, if you take the time to edit a 1500-word essay (about six pages) thoroughly for $13—spending about two to three hours doing an initial copy edit, coupled with a line edit, and then a final proofread in conjunction with an editing software to serve as your final eagle eye—it all comes out to a little over $5 an hour. Since many documents are written by ESL writers, you will also have to do rewrites most of the time to make it decipherable. It is definitely not worth it; you might as well mow lawns for $10 an hour *and* get to spend more time with your family.