Hive Work Review – Scam Opportunity or Are You Missing Out?

Hive Work supposedly “allows talented, hard-working people to make extra money through small jobs that can be done from anywhere in the world at any time” (so they say) and all you need to get started are English competency and an internet connection.

But is this opportunity to earn extra money online worth your time?

You’ve probably heard rumors that this is a waste of time or maybe even that it’s a scam–or you could have even heard rumors that it is the opposite and is a great opportunity to make money online in your spare time.

But what is the truth? Well, in this HIve Work review I’ll be going over all you need to know so that you can see how this works, what the jobs are like, how much money you can make, complaints and more.

Thinking about joining? You are going to want to read this first!

Hive Work Review

Hive Work, some times called Hive Micro is a micro-task site that anyone can join to earn a bit of extra money online–very similar to Amazon Mechanical Turk. The only requirements to get started are English competency and an internet connection.

The types of tasks that you will be able to find here include things that computer AI is not able to complete accurately yet (which helps improve AI learning). This includes tasks like…

• Timestamping a video
• Drawing boundaries around certain objects in an image
• Drawing boundaries around headings in a text document
• Categorizing images
• Naming TV shows & movies from a clip
• and so on…

The tasks don’t take long to complete and pay very little–but the money can add up and you can eventually cash out via PayPal or even Bitcoin.

Members can complete work on any sort of device. You can work from a desktop computer through the website (hivemicro.com) or you can download the mobile app right on your phone.

How It Works

When you login to Hive Work for the first time this is what you will see (if on a desktop computer – you can also download the mobile Hive Work app to your phone)…

You will see all the available jobs listed in the main portion of the page, your balance, stats and payment details over on the right and then some other menu options at the top.

Jobs

First you have the Featured Jobs, which are the best paying ones available to you. As I’m writing this I have 3 available featured jobs, one of which involves drawing polygons around rooftops on a map (I’ll go over this as an example next), another drawing bounding boxes around headings in text documents, and the third one involves drawing bounding boxes around paragraphs in text documents.

So all 3 of the Featured Jobs have to do with drawing boxes around something–which is pretty easy.

In addition to the featured jobs you have the My Jobs section (mine is empty because I’m using a new account and am not currently doing any jobs), and you have the New Jobs section…

In total I had 13 jobs available for me to complete (3 featured jobs and 10 new jobs). HOWEVER, each job has many available tasks. If you take a look at the example below, the one job has 60 available tasks and one of the others has 5,000 tasks available!…

Job Example #1:

One of the best paying jobs available to me right now pays $3.50 per 1,000 tasks, so let’s take a look at this one.

The first thing you have to do is click on “take qualification test”. You have to take a short test before getting accepted to complete any job. When you click to take the test a popup box will come up and you can begin..

So in this example the job is to draw polygons around rooftops of primary residences (houses). You are given the drawing tools needed and all you have to do is draw around the houses as you can see here…

Job Example #2:

Another job I’ll go over as an example is this one where you have to timestamp short videos…

Basically what you do is watch short video clips where there are segments that you have to determine if they are commercials, movie trailers, TV promos, or TV programs–and then you have to use a simple tool they give you to mark where the intro and outro are.

Simple enough right?

These are the types of jobs you find here at Hive Work. They are jobs that are very simple, yet a computer cannot complete them correctly (not yet). The human brain is still needed.

Badges

There is a section called ‘my badges’ that is important to know about. You are able to get badges for achievements within different job categories, such as Categorization jobs and Annotation jobs, and the badges that you earn will determine what types of jobs you are able to get…

For example, some jobs that are listed may require you to have a certain badge showing that you are qualified before you can complete them.

Payments

In order to get paid you first must have $10 in your account. That is the minimum requirement to be able to withdrawal money.

Your options to withdrawal are PayPal and Bitcoin (might vary depending on what country you live in).

In my opinion these are great payment methods. PayPal is a great method of choice because it is trusted and is regular old money–that you can transfer to your bank account or do whatever you want with–and Bitcoin is a nice alternative for all the cryptocurrency enthusiasts out there.

How Much Money Can You Make With Hive Work?

The short answer is NOT MUCH. While there are people who have made thousands of dollars from this platform, they have put countless hours into it and this has been money earned over very long periods of time.

The easiest way to get an idea of how much money you can make working through HiveWork is by taking a look at the leaderboard page, where they list all the top earners from yesterday, last week, and the all-time highest earners.

If we take a look at the people who earned the most money yesterday (“last day”), as I’m writing this the highest earner made $8.63. Total there were only 2 people who made over $8 for the day and what you have to remember is that this is out of EVERYONE working at Hive Work–all the little worker bees, which there are over 100,000 of!

So out of over 100k people, only 2 made more than $8 for the entire day.

As if that isn’t already disappointing enough, it gets a bit worse.

It appears that even earning over $8/day on a regular basis is something that is nearly impossible to accomplish. If we take a look at the highest earners of Last Week (at the time I’m writing this), the person who made the most money made $38.73. Now if you take $38.73 and divide it by 7 days in a week, you get an average earnings of about $5.40 per day.

So while you may be able to earn $8/day and possibly even a bit more, these are not earnings that you can achieve realistically on a daily basis over and over again. The numbers don’t lie.

What you also have to keep in mind is that these top earners are putting in tons of work. As you can see in the table above, the top 2 earners for the week completed over 9,000 tasks each! Now of course there is no way to tell what types of tasks these were, but no matter how you look at it 9k tasks in a week is a heck of a lot.

Referral Program

Of course Hive Work has a referral program so that you can make money by referring others to join.

Sounds pretty awesome at first–making money just by getting others to join–but is it really that awesome?

You guessed it! The answer is no.

You can get up to $5 for each person you refer to join, but in order to make anything they need to take this whole thing pretty seriously, which means a lot of people you refer aren’t going to earn you any money at all.

How it works is like this: When you refer someone to join and they earn $5 completing tasks, you get paid a $1 bonus and they get an extra $0.50 bonus… but ONLY AFTER THEY MAKE $5.So in order for you to get any bonus, your referrals will each pretty much have to complete over 1,000 tasks. It depends on how much each task pays, but generally speaking they will.

All in all the referral program is hardly worth a second thought. If you are going to take this seriously and have friends that are going to as well, then why not give it a try, but if not you aren’t really missing out.

Note: Some of the people claiming that Hive Work is some amazing opportunity to make money are just trying to get referrals and not being 100% honest. 

Complaints

Payments Not Going Through

I was able to find a complaint on ScamAdviser from someone who had a payment that wasn’t going through for some reason, which you can see here…

Apparently some people have been having problems with their payments being processed, which is obviously a big problem.

There are also some reviews on Google Play about this…

Low Pay… of Course..

The fact of the matter is that working and completing tasks with Hive Work is not going to be very rewarding financially. You will earn very little and this is simply not worth it for many of the people out there looking into this opportunity.

I found one review from someone comparing it to modern day slavery (although very different since you aren’t forced to work here)…

… and I even came across a complaint from someone who brings up a very good point–which is that the money you earn might not even cover the cost to charge your device that you are doing the work on! In other words, the electricity required to power your device might cost more than the money you get out of doing the work here.

Banned for No Reason

Hive Work doesn’t want a bunch of people trying to get tasks done as fast as possible and messing around. They want workers that take their time and do good quality, accurate work–this way their AI can learn how to do things the right way.

To protect against workers potentially abusing the system they ban people for short periods of time if they suspect something is up and/or you aren’t putting in quality work. HOWEVER, some people claim to be getting banned for no reason.And there are more reviews like this out there… plenty more.

Usually the ban only lasts for 2 hours or so, but still, that is pretty bad–especially considering the fact that you are already only making pennies working here.

Pros v Cons

Pros

• Easy work, no special skills needed
• Can work remotely from anywhere with internet
• Not many requirements to get started; just need internet connection and the ability to read/comprehend English
• Mobile app available for convenience
• Payment via PayPal and Bitcoin

Cons

• Very low pay
• Boring work; can be mindnumbing
• Waste of time for most peope

The Company Behind It

Finding information about the company behind Hive Work was more difficult than it should be. On the website there is no “About Us” page or anything like that. There is no company information provided at all–no address, no contact number, no name, NO NOTHING.

So I had to do a good bit of digging around to find out more.

It appears that Hive Work is owned by a company simply called Hive, which is a fullstack AI company that develops AI products to help businesses.

There is no actual mention of Hive Work on Hive’s website (thehive.ai), but both places do share the same exact company logo and it makes perfect sense that Hive Work would be owned by an AI development company such as this. They also mention on the website that they “have developed advanced capabilities in object detection, facial recognition, transcription, and many other areas”–which falls into the area of work that is being done at Hive Work.

The point of digging around and looking for more info on the company is to see if this place can be trusted, which I think it can. Everything seems to be legitimate–I just don’t get why they don’t make this information more easily available–such as by adding an About Us page to the hivemicro.com website or something.

Is Hive Work a Scam?

No, this place is not a scam. This is a legitimate opportunity to make some extra money through a legitimate service. There are some hiccups and the pay is extremely low, but overall this is in no way, shape, or form a scam.

There are some people calling it a scam but these people are those who expected to make good money and then found out the reality that they would only make pennies, which is obviously disappointing.

Conclusion – Worth Your Time or Not?

Whether or not working at Hive Work for low pay is worth your time depends on what exactly you are looking for. Yes, the pay is extremely low, but there are some upsides to it–such as the work being super easy and the ability to complete it anywhere that has internet.

That said, for most people it is going to be a waste of time. But there are situations I see where this could possibly be worth it, such as if you…

• Are too young to get a real job and want to earn a bit of extra cash
• You live in a very poor country where there isn’t much opportunity and making pennies like this is worth it
• You are incredibly bored and think you might die of boredom if you don’t do something

Rewards sites like Swagbucks where you get paid to take surveys, play games, complete offers, etc, are already low paying enough, but this is even worse.

So just know what you are getting yourself into if you do decide to join and invest a lot of time in this trying to make money. I hope you enjoyed this review and found it helpful. If looking for better ways to make money in your spare time (and online), then I highly recommend taking a look at this program I use to make a living working from home–or alternatively you can check out this massive list of 70+ ways to make money from home.

Be sure to leave any comments or questions below! 🙂