iWriter is a get paid to write site, similar in format to Hirewriters. It is legit. Real hack writers work their way up to "Elite" level and earn real money at the site. However, the site seems to fail for many, if not most, of the people who try to earn money there. How will it fail you? Let me count the (most common) ways.
1. You must pass an English writing test. If you have writing talent and native fluency in English, the test is easy. Some clients look for people who are fluent in writing or translating other languages as well as English. If you are fully bilingual it may be worth taking the English test and getting the "we'll e-mail you" response. If you have the English writing skills they want, you should be steered to a list of writing jobs. There's a lot of competition, so don't even bother if you're not a professional writer.
2. You start out as a "Standard" writer. Jobs at this level are poorly paid, and although the list of available jobs changes continually, the list of jobs for "Standard writers" is often uninspiring, with choices like "Write a promotion for an app you know is useless" or "Translate a document from a language you don't even recognize." You can wait until an attractive job comes up and bid on it, but that's likely to mean no chance to earn US$2 for that day.
3. Clients can ask for revisions or just flatly reject your writing. They don't have to give a reason at all, and when they do, their reason may be a cover for "I want to use this material without paying for it." Even when their reason is valid, hello, these people aren't good at explaining what they want; that is why they hire hack writers. These problems are common to most writing sites. It's always a good idea to have a default publisher, if only your blog, where you can assert your claim to your work.. However, in most cases the client is a small, poor business, or an individual in desperate circumstances looking for someone to help with legal or academic documents, and won't actually make any money from the document for which you've been cheated either, so you won't have much of a base for a lawsuit. You claim your work just to discourage blatant abuse of the system.
4. At other writing sites, like Hirewriters and Guru, I've worked up and built a base of clients. I was willing to do that at iWriter, too, but it didn't work for me for another peculiar reason. IWriter uses "i-frame" coding to process documents...and some servers, like the free servers most of us penniless writers use, will scramble anything coded with "i-frames." Clients were getting truncated and scrambled versions of what I wrote for them. After reading some of the documents iWriter sent to clients, and comparing them with what I'd written in Word, I was surprised that anybody had ever paid me for anything! Certainly I wasn't going to build the kind of ratings and fans that had pushed me to the top in a few months at Hirewriters. So I've regretfully stopped writing for that site. Meanwhile, people for whom the "i-frame" coding has not been a problem are making money there.
5. What some writers like best, others hate most: If iWriter works for you, you'll have fans who will specify that they're offering a job just for you. IWriter is, like Freelancer, surprisingly unsophisticated about filtering those jobs. They'll show up on the general notice page and annoy all the people wondering whether they'll ever get a decent job through the site.
6. Also, as with Hirewriters, people who've encountered any sort of problem with the site have found their accounts just shut down for no reason. In the absence of any process for arbitration, it's impossible to say whether these are writers who've abused the system (let's admit it, one of Bubblews' problems was that people were pasting in chunks of articles copied directly from Forbes and Reuters) or writers who've been abused by the system (at Hirewriters, their problem was that they didn't want to process tax information as required by U.S. law).
7. Also, it's possible to buy your promotion to "Elite" level rather than earning it. Customers don't like this, nor do writers, but apparently it keeps the site solvent, so that option is still available despite a multitude of complaints.
So, in conclusion: If iWriter works for you, it may serve you well. It's just a site that does not work for a lot of people who've tried it.
