Having come this far in chronicling the site’s slow, wince-worthy slide into functional obscurity, I feel a bit duty-bound to share what I hear around the web from various writer friends of mine. They’ve reportedly been hitting their 1st/15th payday date targets with less and less accuracy, culminating in the email below being sent out to what seems like a wide swath of, if not all of, their writers:
“Hi,
I wanted to let you know that you are one of a group of writers being affected by what we believe to be a Paypal transfer delay that is being caused by the 4th of July holiday.
As you may know, we typically transfer earnings to you within 3 business days from the end of the pay period (1st and 15th of the month). In this case, that would mean you would be paid by this Thursday, the 6th. However, due to the holiday and the above mentioned PayPal transfer issue, we are expecting some payments to go through later this time around. As a reminder, our payment policy suggest that you allow for up to an additional 14 days after the end of the pay period for the funds to clear your account, to account for rare circumstances beyond our control. For more information on our payment policy you can refer to our writer forum post here.”
We can’t tell you exactly when your specific payment will be transferred to you. It may be tomorrow, or it may be next week, but rest assured, we are doing everything possible to transfer the funds to you as soon as possible.”
While other sites have certainly had payment hiccups of their own, this is just the latest in a troubling trend for Zerys. To wave one’s hands about and indicate that payment “could be today, or it could be next week” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in writers that often live paycheck to paycheck. When a site is already infamous for a glut of sub-penny-a-word projects and expecting free work as SOP, issues like this are definitely not doing them any favors.
As I’ve said before, freelance fledglings, steer clear of Zerys.
The Freelance Writer Guide 