Cambly is an online tutoring platform for students who want to learn or practice English as a Second Language. It does this through a method I call "microtutoring", where students can have on-demand classes as short as 15 minutes with a tutor. Cambly is a privately held company, so a lot of information on it is not widely available, including the number of tutors and students. Cambly was started in 2014, but expanded greatly during the Covid-19 pandemic, as normal travel was disrupted and online meetings became much more common. I have also been a tutor on Cambly since 2021, so most of what I write will be from a tutor's perspective.
First, Cambly is paid by the minute, and only time that tutors are actually on a call is paid. The pay rate is 17 cents a minute, which works out to $10.20 an hour, although in practice it is less, since booking a solid schedule is difficult. Students come from a variety of countries, although Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Brazil seem to be the most common, as well as a few East Asian countries, but I have had students from over 50 countries in my time there. Sometimes students request a prepared lesson, which is just going through a slideshow covering a basic grammatical or practical subject. Some student will read an article from Engoo Daily News, although that is a service of a different English tutoring company. Probably the majority of students want to have free conversation, which is obviously the easiest thing to do as a tutor. Under most circumstances, at least. Some students are fluent speakers who are going to graduate school in the United States. On the other end, some students are basic speakers who can only answer questions in monosyllables, and trying to think up questions to keep a conversation going for 30 minutes can be difficult in that situation. The tutor has a few tools provided to them, including a whiteboard, screenshare and chat box with translation, but the basic communication is just video chat.
Tutors have two main ways to teach classes. The first is by opening their schedule so students can make reservations. They can do this as both open to all students, or only open to regular students they have talked with before. There is no limit on how much or how little availability tutors need to have. Tutors can also schedule "Priority Hours" where they answer calls from students who need a tutor. Imagine a combination between a tech support queue and speed dating, only for English language teaching. Priority Hours also come with a guaranteed minimum, so in the rare occasions that there are no students who need a tutor, a tutor will still make 15 minutes of income, at 17 cents a minute! Do the math on what that means!
Tutors are rated by students, on a 5 point scale. The rating determines how tutors are shown to students, and also the availability of the Priority Hours. It is actually a pretty sensitive system, and a slight change in rating can go from having work available whenever a tutor wishes, to having to schedule it weeks in advance. It is also not transparent how and why ratings change. This is one of the reasons I never managed to make it a regular source if income.
I could say a lot more about how the platform works, but it is probably too much detail for the bigger conceptual question: does working like this make sense at all? I have a stock answer for that: gig economy jobs are good, if you don't actually need a job. As an additional source of income, only utilized when the tutor otherwise wouldn't be working, it is actually a nice source of money for some very casual work. It is very flexible, and a tutor can pop on almost whenever they feel like it and make a few extra dollars. Since a tutor can choose to only work with regulars, they can also work only with students they have chosen. And tutors are also free to leave the platform for weeks, or months at a time, working no hours at all, and then can rejoin without any problem. The problem is that when trying to fill a schedule, as if this was a full time job, the actual pay per hour is usually around $6-8. Of course, you are technically free when not in class, but in practice, you are just waiting for your next class. Considering that teaching English as a second language often involves education and skill, working for less than minimum wage is difficult, especially when dealing with problems like technical glitches or abrasive students. So looked at one way, this is a way to turn some spare time into spare cash by having some fun, casual conversations about things like music, movies and travel with interesting people around the world. Looked at another way, it is a place where people with a graduate school level education are working for less than minimum wage, and with constant insecurity and sometimes stressful conditions. I joined Cambly during the worst of the pandemic, and it made sense to work from home, building up my skill and experience by talking to students all around the world, but over time, despite trying to make it work, I never quite did. Currently, I work limited hours and probably make $100 a month on Cambly.
I have mostly talked about this from a tutor's viewpoint. Obviously, one thing to consider is that these problems with teacher morale might lead to bad experiences for students, and based on at least some stories, that seems to be the case. But on the other hand, many students, especially self-directed ones, are able to find good conversational practice on Cambly.