VocalReviews of vocal.media

Signed up with introductory offer which after a month, rolled over to $9.99 per month. Needed to cancel for $$ reasons. There was no Cancel Subscription button anywhere. Contacted Vocal.media; Sunny keeps saying there’s no account associated w my email, yet they keep billing my CC! (Vocal’s phone num is an investment company.) Had to go thru CC company to stop payments.

It’s not just me, hundreds of people are starting to believe that Vocal is a scam. So many “winners” have only written one story and they just aren’t well written, especially first place winners. In fact no one in any of the Vocal Facebook groups have ever known any of the first place winners unless it was sponsored by another company. It’s becoming very clear that fake accounts are being made by vocal and that $5,000 winning prize money is just going back into vocal or its “employees”. Beware that this platform may very well be a scam. If Vocal Media kept giving 1st place winnings to known people in the community, there would be no suspicion. People should report to the BBB.

Awful awful awful. The positive ratings on this are clearly from vocal staff. I don't know a single person who has anything good to say about it after using it. Stay well clear

The “editors”/moderators on Vocal shouldn’t even be editing listicals in Buzzfeed. (You know the ones with headlines like this: Here are ten reasons why Vocal+ isn’t worth your money. #6 might surprise you!). They are clearly in out of their depth, and should stick with the kiddy pool. Anyone thinking of paying for a Vocal+ membership because it is required to enter their contests should know it is like drawing the winners out of a hat, some of which don’t even meet the basic criteria of the genre prompt given. Good luck.

They don't promote your stories on the website. People can't search for them or access them. They are available only if you directly send a link to people. Vocal are literally forcing people to advertise their website if they want their stories to be read. Scummy

Essentially a scam. The quality of your writing doesn't matter to these ultra liberal pink-haired shower dodgers.

Completely lacking in transparency. Contests (which come with huge prize money awards) seem to have winners picked at random - the quality of winners is often dreadful, and a recent contest winner was 800 words over the word limit. The judges aren't publicly named, so I suspect they're just random members of Vocal's staff. It's not clear what criteria are used to decide which stories are sent to the judges - it seems to be purely whether or not some low-level moderator likes your story enough to pass it on. No feedback is ever given - not even about the contest winners and the reasons they are chosen. Getting to be featured as a "top story" seems to have the same problems as well - many are either promoting brands or bigging up Vocal as a website, rather than being stories / articles that are any good. Basic spelling and grammar mistakes are a common sight. The website is horrendously optimised for search engines, so good luck getting organic traffic to anything you write - I googled my name and the title of several articles I have had "published" on Vocal and got zero results. It's almost impossible to get decent numbers of reads. Their adverts claim that you can earn up to $6000 a month - I would like to see the evidence for this. Maybe if you somehow win multiple competitions, it is possible, but based off the incredibly low amounts you get paid for people reading your articles, it is virtually impossible. Once I have finished submitting to the current round of contests I will be cancelling my membership. I do not intend to go back.

I really don't think they judge the competitions but just pick a winner at random. I thought about entering because the prizes are apparently quite high but before spending the time I looked at some of the previous winners and losers. When you do this it becomes very hard to see the merit in the winners, and I read very many better losers. Conclusion - they can't possible be reading them and it's therefore just a method of harvesting $9 a month. Will save my effort and put it towards competitions run by genuine literary societies. At least then, when I lose, I'll know I was beaten fair and square by better material.