I joined Mouthshut.com today after receiving an e-mail from one of my friends. I was a little leary since the site is based in Bombay, India, but I decided to give it a try.
As we all know writing sites come and go and most start out with a good amount for your articles and then dwindle down to nothing. I hope that Mouthshut.com will be different.
I am concerned that we will not be paid for 6 months and then we don’t know how or what we will be paid. Will it be gift certificates, merchandise, money, or what? How much will our points be worth dollar for dollar?
My first impression when I saw the site was that it looks exactly as the old Epinions site did before they updated. It has no advertisements or banners so how are they making money by us writing articles?
Mouthshut has some features I really like such as getting points for reading and rating articles, getting the updates really quick, and they layout of the site.
Another concern is that the points we have earned are available for everyone to see. In my opinion, that should be private. No other site shows everyone what you are making.
Also, many of the categories such as education or restaurants only have categories that are from India. I have probably requested over 100 categories and subcategories today.
I hope this site turns out to be a great one, but for now I will just sit back and wait and see.