Can you Make Money with Chacha
ChaCha.com is a text message-based search engine. Users text their questions to 242242 (CHACHA) or call 1-800-2CHACHA and a ChaCha guide searches for an answer, which is sent back to the user via text message.
ChaCha's FAQ claims that you can make $3-9 an hour as a guide, but in my experience that is a very generous estimate. Expeditors - guides who match questions with answers to similar questions (Previously Answered Questions, or PAQ); categorize new questions; and weed out conversational questions, bad keywords, and questions that violate ChaCha's terms of service - make $0.03 per question answered. This certainly doesn't sound like much, and it isn't. Even with easy to answer or categorize questions coming in constantly, it takes an average of at least 10 seconds to answer a question, plus another 5 or so for the pages to reload.
That adds up to a maximum of $4.50 an hour on a very good day. Most days, it's $3 an hour and sometimes even less, as many questions can take 30 seconds to a minute to categorize properly, understand (deciphering textspeak and misspellings is one of the most difficult parts of the job), or type a response. It also depends on the time of day; in my experience ChaCha is busiest in the late evening, but during school hours and overnight there are often lulls of 30 seconds to over a minute between questions. These time lags eat away at an already meager income.
Another impediment towards earning money with ChaCha is the fact that it can be repetitive and dull. Generalists and Specialists, guides who actually search for new answers (and earn $0.10-0.20 per answer for doing so) might have a more fun time, but Expeditors and Transcribers (guides who answer voice questions) spend most of their time weeding out stupid questions. Sometimes it seems like the majority of questions are users unable to spell keywords right time and time again; requests for the guide's name, number, and favorite sexual position; and verbal harassment from users unhappy with the some other guide's answer, sometimes it was a genuinely bad answer but more often because ChaCha guides are not psychic enough to find a person based on their first name and favorite sandwich filling or to correctly guess a random user's birthday.
Still, ChaCha can provide an easy part-time job that parents or students can do from home. It's not a way to get rich quick, but it can make you a few extra dollars a day with some simple busy work as you're watching TV.
