Pricing strategies by transcription companies

The Online Transcription Services is becoming more and more popular amongst professionals, media persons, academicians, students and from varied walks of professions. The outbreak demand of transcription services has led to an equally matched increase in the number of transcription service providers and free lancers all across the globe. The charge of this service is calculated on different criterion's depending on the service provider. The increase in the number of service providers has certainly benefited the service buyers in terms of quality and cost of the transcription service.
Some common references for the cost calculation of transcription services are:
Cost per line
This is one of the commonly used for the transcription service cost calculation. Service providers set their rates as per the number of lines transcribed. The industry set standard of number of words in a line is 65. The cents per line you would be paid (by a transcription company) or that you would charge depends on volume of work, difficulty of work, where you are in the world and can even vary from area to area in your own country.
Cost / minute
Rate per minute is the most common way of calculating the cost of service. This is well accepted by both the parties as it is easier to charge for the service and is more transparent. However, one must carefully calculate the per minute rate taking into account the clarity of the sound, speed at which the conversation takes place, presence of dialects or other languages with which you may not be familiar, etc. The download time and internet expenses involved in downloading the source files, which can be huge, should also be taken into consideration.
Cost per page
Another way of charging for the service is rate per page. This way of charging for the transcription is not so popular amongst the service providers because the audio file may contain lots of pauses, the transcribers would have to go through the entire audio and pauses that would only end up into few pages.

Based on industry production, standards guidelines published by Office Business Center Association International, the general rule is that to transcribe 15 minutes of recorded audio, one may do it in one to two hours. The quality of audio is a primary concern while charging for the service, a difficult audio or a poor quality of language accent of speakers is usually charged more than the normal audio because of the difficult interpretation.
Rate/ word
This is usually practised while doing medical transcription. As it requires precise knowledge and the whole set of skills in the field of health sciences. And there fore the cost is levied on the basis of word count rather than on the basis of minutes of transcription.
Extra fees may be charged if any of the following circumstances occur:

• Poor audio quality
• Multiple interviewees
• Thick accents
• Poorly recorded interviews
• Focus groups, panel discussions, lectures
• Mini- & micro-cassettes for telephone interviews transcription
• Scanning tapes to find interviews that are mixed in with B-ROLL or blank portions of tape

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Etranscriber Transcription offers affordable transcription rates for general transcription services.
Source: http://goarticles.com/