Practice evaluating an online posting

[erichamion]

While browsing some job boards to get a feel of what's where, I came across a particular posting at getafreelancer.com, and I have a few questions.

1. Is it a bad idea to look at these things before I have the skills to competently complete a job? (Granted, the average person off the street probably has skills meeting what this person is willing to pay for. I'll let somebody else choose to work for a dollar an hour, though.)

2. Why or why not?

3. To try to get a feel for what somebody would be earning with the project budget vs. what the job would be worth, as well as to get practice doing such comparisons, I tried to do some estimates. Are the below numbers way off? Where? (I'm not asking whether the offer is reasonable, but whether the estimates and assumptions I made make sense and whether the process could be applied to other offers).


This is the posting:

Need original sound files in good clear American English for dictionary. This project is for 8000 words. Bids that provide good samples for the words "breakability", "bronchiole" and "pertinaciousness" will be favored.

Each word should be in separate wav file without leading or trailing silence, and easily tracked to the relevant word (e.g. with filename corresponding to the word, or a sequential filename matching the word number in the word list; separate files can be generated automatically fairly easily by splitting long single files of words at silences). You should check your work by listening to all the separate files and checking they agree with the original word list.

Mother-tongue American English speakers only.

The project budget is $30-$250 (Note that $30 is the minimum bid allowed on the site).

For free accounts, GAF takes a commission of 10% or $5, whichever is greater. Therefore, working within the project budget means receiving $25-$225.
Since this is not normal, connected text, but distinct words, the edited audio (before separating into individual files) should run no more than 45 words per minute, probably less. This gives a total running time of 178 minutes (2.97 hours) finished audio.
The normal estimate of recording and editing time is 3 minutes work per minute of finished audio, but this seems like it would be an exception. No matter how large his or her vocabulary, the talent would most likely need to look up some words, which would add time. Splitting into individual files, naming, trimming, and checking would add significant time. Is 5-7 minutes work per minute of finished audio a reasonable estimate? If so, that gives 14.85-20.79 total working hours.
The maximum hourly rate, then, is ($225/14.85 hrs) $15.15/hr. The minimum rate is ($25/20.79 hrs) $1.20/hr.
To get an idea of what the project might actually be worth, I went to voices.com's "standard" rate sheet, realizing that union and many non-union talents' fees would be significantly higher. The closest category I could find was for e-learning (well, you do learn from a dictionary...is there a better match?), which is $300 for the first hour, then $100/hour of session time, not finished audio. That and the above time estimates give a fee of $1700-$2300.

Does that make sense? 8000 words, almost 3 hours running time, about 15-21 hours working time, $1.20-$15.15 per hour if within project budget, $1700-$2300 fee by voices.com "standard" rates? At this point, should I worry about being able to make this sort of estimate?

[Robert Jadah]

Leaping Lexicons, Eric.
That's a pearl of a miserly posting you've uncovered there. Personally, I wouldn't even read the job description a second time for less than $50.
Leaving your mathematics and the blood-sucking budget aside for the moment, a posting like this should raise some red flags.
If, for example, "separate files can be generated automatically fairly easily", then he should be doing it.
Any time I'm told how simple an assignment is, I know it's going to be a major headache.

And do I understand correctly that he wants the talent to research and define the words?
He should be doing that, too. And - with definitions - that would bring the word count way, way up, no?

Iif you're practicing job evaluations, this one yells, "RUN AWAY!"

But, were I forced at gunpoint, I'd calculate 8,000 words (without the definition), including research, reading, editing, and filing, at 60 seconds per.
That brings us to some 130 hours' work. At a rock-bottom $50/hour, we're talking about six thou.
(I'd also quake a lot.)

But when he says free-lance, he obviously means it.

Head-Shakingly Yours,

[Scott Pollak]

Robert is, as usual, right on target here, Eric.

Interestingly, I declined to submit for a somewhat similar lead today on Bodalgo.

So responding to your questions, Eric:

1. It's never a bad idea to check behind every conceivable door/lead for work, regardless of whether you're an aspiring v/o dude/dudette or a potential puppeteer looking for gigs doing matinee shows for the pre-k crowd. Read through every lead you might possibly be able to audition for, but at the same time being very honest about what you SHOULD be submitting for, based on your capabilities and the clients' expectations, budgets, etc. Better to NOT submit for some jobs than to submit something that you're wildly unqualified to do and begin to develop a reputation for delivering guano to the client.

2. See above

3. The budget???? ah oh ho ho ho ho ho hah ha aha ha ahah ha!!!
Oh my Gawd. Robert took one approach to estimating the costs, but I'll have to beg to differ that coming up with a price that is close to $1/word is a bit excessive. Another route is a pure per-word fee. You could go with, say, .40/word which comes to about $3200. 8000 words also simply spoken in script form comes out to roughly 50 minutes of talking. However, you and RJ are both correct in that you have to realistically add in time for recording, corrections, editing, file-saving, looking up words, etc. So realistically figuring at least 3 minutes per word we're now up to 150 minutes, or 2.5 hours at least of billable time. My e-learning fees are $800 per finished running hour of audio. This means for each actual one hour of usuable audio I deliver to the client, after re-dos, editing, etc, I charge $800. In this case you'd be looking at charging at least $2000 if you went that route.

But we're splitting redwoods here. The point is: run, don't walk, as fast and furiously away from this acid-inducing, ulcer-infested lead as possible.

[erichamion]

Thanks for the responses. Don't worry - I wasn't considering taking this. I was more interested in seeing whether I could tell how ridiculous the offer was than in finding whether it was reasonable. Your responses did help with that.

I also though somebody might get a laugh out of the posting/budget.

Some interesting comments have been made on the clarification/comments board for the job. After a couple of service providers gently pointed out the budget is a little low for the work involved, the seeker's response was:

The trick is to record one long file with lots of words (hundreds). Leave about 2 clear seconds between words, then use a sound program to split the long file at the silences automatically into separate files for each word. Then check-listen to the files (which is quick apart from fixing occasional errors). It is quite possible to do a few thousand a day this way at the same time as maintaining quality.

There's no need to research - if you don't know a word you can skip it. I'm not expecting people to look up words in a dictionary to find the pronunciation.

That gives rise to a couple of questions. The first, of course, is Robert's question - if it's so easy, why is he hiring somebody?

The second question has to do with that phrase, "quick apart from fixing occasional errors." What happens when I skip word number 47, but the splitting program doesn't know that? Similarly, what if a breath is too loud and the splitter puts in an extra word at number 47? Then I'm renaming 7953 files!

Then, this comment from a service provider is just puzzling.

I agree with my fellow bidders. The price is too low.
I have experience with voice recording, video and audio editing. You can check my review.
I'll gladly do the full project at $300.
Please do contact me if interested!

Huh? Does that mean what it says?

[connieterwilliger]

There are two programs that will automatically save each file with a unique file name - Vox Studio and something new called Word2Wav that I am going to download a test.

Vox Studio will do the file splitting job - but you are sooo right about missing a word and ending up with everything past that miss-named. Vox Studio also will easily batch process and add the silence.

I have a per prompt fee for this kind of work - and it isn't low - for a couple of reasons - they want consistency and quality over the long term.