Other Income Ideas Mostly accurate, with one big caveat

By the Income Reality Check Editorial Team · Updated 2026-08-26 · 7 min read

Five “boring” online jobs that are always hiring — and the pay the video doesn’t linger on

Verdict: Mostly accurate, with one big caveat. The jobs are real and the seats really do keep reopening, but the on-screen pay figures flatter what a first-timer actually earns.

Judd Albring’s video “5 BORING But Easy Online Jobs That Are Always Hiring In 2026!” makes an unusually honest pitch for the genre. He argues that a whole class of remote roles stays open not because they need rare skills, but because the work is dull enough that people quit within weeks. He’s mostly right. The caveat is that the salary cards he flashes on screen — pulled from Glassdoor — sit at the optimistic end of a wide range, and one of his five jobs isn’t priced the way he implies.

What the video actually claims

Albring opens with a real statistic: U.S. quit rates have run high in recent years, and entry-level roles churn faster than management. He’s paraphrasing the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover data, and the framing holds up. High turnover does mean constant reposting.

From there he walks through five roles: digital metadata clerk (a repackaged data-entry job), search quality rater, content risk reviewer (content moderator), online chat support representative, and insurance claims processor. For each, he describes the day-to-day, rates the “opportunity” out of ten, and tells you where to search — LinkedIn, Indeed, WeWorkRemotely, plus vendor names like TELUS International, Appen, Teleperformance, OneForma and Arise. He flags claims processing as the best-paying of the five and gives it an 8/10.

To his credit, he says the pay numbers are Glassdoor averages, not guarantees, and that watching the video won’t get you hired. That disclaimer matters. It also conveniently sits next to two revenue streams: a “free list of 100 companies” lead magnet and an affiliate plug for a training program called Course Careers. Neither is a scam, but both are the reason a free video exists.

What do these jobs actually pay?

Here’s where the on-screen cards do some quiet lifting. Glassdoor’s “quality rater” pages show eye-catching averages — one TELUS Digital figure lands near $38 an hour — but those numbers pool senior linguists, project leads and specialized raters with the entry-level seat you’d actually be filling. Job listings tell a plainer story. ZipRecruiter and Indeed postings for TELUS and Appen rater work cluster around $14–$17 an hour, and the work is almost always part-time by design.

The data-entry role (his “digital metadata clerk”) is the cleanest to check because BLS tracks it directly. Data Entry Keyers had a median wage of $18.17 an hour in May 2023, roughly $37,800 a year, per the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. The bottom 10% earned under $13.58; the top 10% cleared $26.60. So the honest range is real, but the middle is modest.

Content moderation pays a bit more and costs a bit more of you. Glassdoor’s content moderator data puts the average near $27 an hour, with a typical band of roughly $43,000 to $75,000. What the video mentions only in passing — “some emotional resilience because you will come across content that’s not very pleasant” — is the actual job. You’re reviewing flagged material all shift, and the burnout he cites as your “opportunity” is burnout for a reason.

Then there’s the claim that trips the caveat. Albring frames insurance claims processing as the top earner. But the entry role he describes — moving standard claims through a verification pipeline, high-school diploma sufficient — maps to Insurance Claims and Policy Processing Clerks, whose BLS median was about $46,900 in May 2023. The $70k-plus figures floating around belong to Claims Adjusters, Examiners, and Investigators, a separate, higher-skill occupation with a median near $76,790 — and one BLS projects to decline 5% through 2034. Same word, “claims,” two different paychecks.

Who actually wins this game

The video is right that these doors are open. What it underplays is why staying inside them is hard, and who the arrangement really serves. Search-rater and moderation work is overwhelmingly routed through third-party vendors — Appen, TELUS, Teleperformance — as independent-contractor or short-term gigs. That structure is fragile. In January 2024, Google terminated its rater contract with Appen, a deal worth roughly 26% of Appen’s revenue, and thousands of raters lost hours with little notice. If your income depends on a single platform’s supplier contract, a boardroom decision you’ll never see can end it overnight.

So who wins? Companies that would “rather not keep re-hiring,” as Albring puts it, win by design — the churn is cheaper than fixing the conditions that cause it. Among workers, the people who do well are the ones treating these as steady supplemental income (a rater shift alongside another job) or as a genuine foot in the door who then use employer training to move into adjusting, escalations, or IT. The clerk who stalls at the entry rung is the one the model quietly assumes will quit.

What you’d realistically earn

Set expectations at the listing, not the average. A beginner rater or chat agent is looking at roughly $14–20 an hour, often part-time, which can mean $1,000–$2,000 a month rather than a full salary. Data entry and claims-processing clerks who land a full-time seat can reach the high-$30k to high-$40k range, and that’s a real, unglamorous living — closer to the truth than either a doom take or a hype take.

None of these is passive. Every dollar is an hour worked. That’s not a knock; it’s the whole point of a job. Just don’t confuse it with the “set it and forget it” income the rest of YouTube sells. If you want the AI-assisted version of low-barrier online work, our look at 5 jobs so desperate they’ll hire you with no experience and the earlier 6 boring but easy online jobs always hiring in 2026 cover adjacent ground.

Who this is (and isn’t) for

This works for someone who needs income now, has a reliable computer and quiet hours, can tolerate repetition, and wants a legitimate paycheck without a degree or a portfolio. It suits students, caregivers, and anyone rebuilding a work history. It does not suit someone chasing a five-figure month, anyone who’d be wrecked by graphic content (skip moderation entirely), or a person who can’t absorb the instability of contractor gig work. And one more filter: a legitimate version of these jobs never asks you to pay upfront. The FTC logged $150.4 million in job-scam losses in a single quarter of 2025, with a median loss around $2,000, often through fake “data entry” and remote-clerk listings that push you onto text-only apps. Real employers deduct screening fees from a paycheck; they don’t demand them up front.

What to remember

Albring’s list is accurate about the thing that’s hardest to fake: these jobs exist and they reopen constantly. The caveat is calibration. Read the salary cards as ceilings, not midpoints; treat rater and moderation gigs as unstable by structure; and know that the “best-paying” claims job he shows is the clerk role, not the adjuster role that shares its name. Boring and available is a real edge. Just walk in with the right number in your head.