Results Are In – Does The Best Spinner Out-Perform Magic Article Rewriter? Here Is How The Best Spinner And Magic Article Rewriter Compare (Part Two)

I am something of {a unique|an original|a one-of-a-kind|an eccentric} {case|study|example} when it comes to doing this trial of The Best Spinner versus Magic Article Rewriter – many people buy either product (or in the case of TBS they subscribe to the annual service) because they either hate writing or can’t, but I’m using the spinners because of a workload and efficiency issue. I also have plans to actually have functioning fingers by the time I’m 40, and typing one more key stroke than is necessary is…well, {lame|simply unnecessary|counter-productive|are you tired of the spinning humor, yet?|dumb|a study in futility}.

So I’m making an evaluation on which software to keep – and actually didn’t mean to step into the controversy in the first place, but I’m in it for speed at this point and I refuse to cut my profits by hiring a writer to do my Elance gigs (I hired my wife and one of my daughters to do that once and neither likes the work), so a spinner and rewriter was necessary.

When I first bought Magic Article Rewriter, to tell the truth, I was happy with it. It wasn’t and isn’t really “broken,” I don’t really have a hard-core complaint against it. I just happened to keep hearing from other IM’ers that I respect that The Best Spinner put all others to shame.

Well, with such rave reviews and a mountain of articles to spin and rewrite…why wouldn’t I try it out? So I did. The results of the time trial are as follows:

Time trial with MAR vs TBS

Raw Materials – This is What I Was Working With:

Every section of the test had 2 articles, about 400-500 words each
Simple, straight forward text, my rewrites took 10 – 12 mins each

This was/is my current Elance project, my client is likely using Unique Article Wizard (blending 3 versions of the articles to form one unique article) – so minimal spinning is required per contract, only 4 places minimum per paragraph. Just for the record, I overkill spinning by habit – I get into it. So, all articles were around 45-55% spun.

Parameters

1) 2 manual spins using no tech support, writing in Notepad++

2) 2 semi-auto spins using both MAR/TBS. In other words, “identify synonyms” and then highlight the text using the Tab or Shift + Tab keys, then select synonyms provided and write a few of my own if needed.

3) Automatic spins: MAR uses the “Magic Button,” a database upgrade of 18k synonyms. TBS uses a dynamic list connected to the server – “Replace Everyone’s Favorites” feature. It boasts 846 thousand synonyms and growing. I just added to the list tonight. So you know there’s at least two more synonyms in there.

I limited the synonyms to 5 with each software. This step will also include me editing out the synonyms that don’t work – because there *is no replacement* for a human editor.

Manual Trial Results (Notepad++ Text Editor From PARADISE!)

Article #1
Word count: 468
Time: 27 mins

Article #2:
Word count: 431
Time: 22 mins

Head-To-Head, MAR v. TBS

Magic Article Rewriter

Article #3:
Word count: 447
Time: 34 mins

Article #4:
Word count: 460
Time: 26 mins — **used free-flow, did NOT hit “define synonyms”**

MAR Full-Auto/”Magic Button”

Article #5:
Word count: 452
Time: 22 mins

Article #6:
Word count: 478
Time: 22 mins

The Best Spinner Semi-Auto

Article #7:
Word count: 460
Time: 26
(Still learning…didn’t watch training vids yet…)

Article #8:
Word count: 432
Time: 18 mins!
WOW! :O
(When I was at church today I kept thinking, “18 minutes?!” <<–shame on me)

TBS Full-Auto

Article #9:
Word count: 400
Time: 25 mins

Article #10:
Word count: 523
Time: 35 min…?!!

Note that both programs wind up on average more or less neck-and-neck under “semi-auto,” I think I could have done better w/The Best Spinner on the first go round, but got bogged down with synonym choices (not a bad problem to have, I just need to get used to it).

Alright, so to be clear, “Semi-Auto” is where I hit the “define synonyms” button but do not use the automatic synonym feature. What happens in both cases is that the software will give a drop-down menu of the synonyms when you highlight a phrase or word. This feature is my preferred method, simply because editing 5 x 5 x 5 permutations of every sentence saves me some keystrokes…but doesn’t really save me time from what I can do manually.

I have found that using Magic Article Rewriter with the Magic Button upgrade ($37 extra) is the best way to use the software – which surprised me! Compare that to The Best Spinner time, and that software is so jam-packed with synonyms that I wanted to throw my laptop at my Chihuahua.

Not really, I sorta love my dog, and I assure you I don’t abuse anything except energy drinks and green tea. And beef jerky.

So, I do *not* personally like TBS for that feature: it’s a headache editing all of that noise.** Just think if you mass rewrite the articles for submission, without editing them at the level in which they have their spin-tags (both allow you to export using any spin syntax you define, btw, which is great) – you’d wind up with hundreds of articles chock-full of sentences that read as smoothly as a gravel pit…with pot holes…so: you have to edit these things, and that means making sure you edit entire sentences, keep the flow of the thoughts in tact, and convey good information all at once.

**Editor’s note: please see correction below re: the “correct” way to edit The Best Spinner’s spun articles — the creator of the software corrected me in the comment section.  Also note the revised rating based on this new information.**

On the one hand, it’s *fabulous* that TBS offers, hands-down, the *best* idea and the *best* thesaurus feature in the universe of IM tools – they’re all updated as you use the system, and as other users hit “save as favorite” as they edit their articles. BUT that means you have this crazy beast of an article to edit once you hit that cursed “Replace Everyone’s Favorites” button.

There is one feature that I used and it bears mentioning in this version of TBS, v. 2.27: the ability to select the quality or depth of the spins. Actually, this is drop-dead gorgeous them of The Best Spinner – the theme is “user-friendly” and that is undeniable, from the size of the synonym box to where you edit (you can have all synonyms populate in the lower half of the screen, which is nice when trying to read a complicated stack of spin syntax).

I was only going one level deep here on all versions of this spinning test, which means no nesting. Nesting looks like this on a two-level nest:

{Swiss cheese is the {best|wisest|most {flavorful |marvelous |wonderful |inventive}|hands-down best} use of holes in the {known|perceived|discovered|{physical|concrete|real} world, other than my {socks|head|nostrils}.}

OK, so the nested or level 2 spin is “flavorful->>marvelous->>wonderful–>>inventive” as well as “physical” and “socks”…On this spin and per my Elance contract, this is only a one-level-spin job. Just imagine having to edit a 2, 3, 4 or more level nested spin, after hitting the “Replace Everyone’s Favorites” button in TBS — ouch! It could take hours, weeks, years! Heck, you could see Haley’s Comet by the time you had it all figured out, man. TBS thankfully allows you to select the level of nesting, so I set it at “0″.

Another feature of TBS is that it allows you to select the quality of the spins, the selection looks like this screen shot:

The Best Spinner Replace Everyone's Favorites Quality Selection

I chose “Best” for the trials here, and that gives you the highest quality spins with the fewest selected overall terms.

So, that’s the problem with auto-replacing synonyms: editing is a bear, but notice that Magic Article Rewriter performed *better* on that level — what gives? Well: TBS did worse because it gave so many options to dig through, MAR doesn’t have as many synonyms (about 1/47th of TBS!), and that’s actually a good thing. Remember, the main reason for synonyms isn’t to re-create Shakespeare, it’s mainly to avoid the duplicate content penalty and to get the most amount of unique articles out there, which will = the most backlinks. MAR’s synonym replacement feature, the “Magic Button,” does that excellently. TBS kills it…then exhumes it…and shoots it again.

Sorry. Too many zombie movies as a kid…

Actually, because there is also a bit of a sticky problem with MAR’s navigation – if you hit “identify synonyms” this will define for the system what groups of words are targets for the software’s synonym replacement. It sort of creates a jumpiness to the navigation that even TBS has after hitting the same button, but another problem is the way the system handles carriage returns. See the pics to follow below…

One other issue that did bug me about MAR is the way the window that has the synonyms is vertically just large enough that my HDTV-style monitor isn’t tall enough to really accommodate it without getting in the way of part of the article I’m editing. The solution is simple, really: make the synonym box side-by-side the article. Otherwise you have to constantly dance around your content, moving the synonym box out of the way.

Magic Article Rewriter Exports to Four Main Article Submission Services

See how the synonym box-thingy highlights the end of the sentence, along with the carriage return and also the beginning of the next paragraph? At every carriage return, this happens. It’s a glitch that I’m sure would go away if I had just uploaded a non-word-wrapped document (or used some other apparatus like a forward slash or hash tag for denoting the line breaks, may even the html code for the line break?).

That box with four article submission services (including the Magic Article Submitter, hyperlinked at top and hard to see in the picture – I’m getting that software for sure!) is the same size as the synonym box, and takes up more than half of the vertical on my screen, which has a 16:9 ratio. In other words, it’s always in the way, unless you do this:

Here is one of the navigation issues with Magic Article Rewriter

Ah! Much better. Not sure how that plays out on an older screen, maybe more vertical space? This is an easy fix, but here’s what that same box looks like in TBS, and I much prefer it, see the bottom picture here on the left.
Scroll a bit.

The Best Spinner Synonym Feature - Traveling Synonym Box

The lower pic has it.

TBS’s box actually travels along with you hanging off the text, underlining it and giving your eyes something to “rest” on, and no navigation issues that I found just yet.

Now, I think that using the Magic Button saves the day because instead of highlighting everything, you’re going through and de-selecting the terms you don’t want (with a *much better system* of mass-selecting terms for removal than TBS seems to offer at this time, I have to add!) is actually pretty easy. You hit this icon in the header that looks like a big red X, and if you want to de-select a group of spin-tagged words all at once, you just hit the selection: poof! Back to its original state.

That’s hot stuff, folks, and I’m not playin’. It’s much easier to do that than what TBS offers, which **from what I can tell** is to go through and de-select every term, one at a time. When you have to click 3-5 times more than MAR to de-select a spun term, it adds up to me shaking my head and appreciating MAR.

*****Editor’s Note and an official, “I stand corrected!”*****

In a comment below, the creator of The Best Spinner, Jonathan Leger himself — how’d he know about me? That’s SEO, folks…or sheer luck…he’s a bloodhound? Anyway, Jonathan corrected me, thankfully, about the following beautiful truth about his product (how is that for customer service?!) :

Just a point about fast cleanup in TBS that you might have missed. If you click the Help icon it shows you a list of keyboard shortcuts, among which are:

# CTRL + Mouse Click – If you hold CTRL and click the mouse on a word or phrase inside a block of spin-formated text, the word or phrase you click on will be removed from the spin text.

# ALT + Mouse Click – Like CTRL-Click except it removes the synonym from ALL spin-formatted text matching the one you click in.

So if you’re not using those, it makes clean-up time MUCH faster.

Oh, right – you mean to tell me I could have watched the 2 minute training videos that cover all aspects of The Best Spinner in small chunks? Yep: note to self, James, read or watch the instructions…Thanks, Johnathan! What a privilege that you took the time. I have now upgraded the rating, reflected in the crossed-out text and new numbers.

*****/End Editor’s Note…happier than ever for my purchase! (I wish you could see my grin – this crazy thing just got much, much better for me.)*****

I have to say: I didn’t watch many of the training vids for TBS. I figured it out as I went along – and both systems offer great training vids, btw – so I could be wrong, there may be a feature in TBS that allows you to select a whole section of bracketed terms and make them revert to the original word/phrase…But I didn’t find it. And I’m not talking about highlighting a whole section – I’m on my laptop with a touch-pad, for goodness’ sakes, that would be a chore to do to highlight everything that way – MAR just lets you touch any of the terms in a section and hit the mouse button after selecting the “de-select” tool. You can also hit the button with the Ctrl key and select just one term at a time – and both systems offer that.

OK. The verdict. Out of 5 stars, I have to give:

Notepad++ 4.3 stars
MAR 4.6 stars
TBS 4.8 stars 5 Stars! (Per Editor’s Note Above)

Let me explain *why* I just upgraded from a 4.8 to a full 5 stars:

1) The creator of the software just stopped by…to tell me a feature I had missed re: editing articles that are spun. Mind you: I need that information both as a consumer (he’s got a series of instructional videos that are in 2 minute chunks on the help desk, accessible through the software and online), as well as a freelance writer…GOOD ON YA, JOHN!  What’s the price of great customer service?

Well, exactly 0.2 stars, at least, but in one fell swoop now Johnathan just made me a loyal customer.  Seriously – you don’t do that sort of thing unless you truly put out quality products, and that’s real value right there.  Priceless move, Johnathan, priceless.

2) About 95% of the problems I had with TBS have just been answered, and now I realize that The Best Spinner is more or less as flawless as it comes. It still doesn’t make my banana pancakes, nor does it help my wife around the house with dishes…but I have to draw the line somewhere.

I am simply enthralled that the features that I was lauding its main competitor for, Magic Article Rewriter, have been there on TBS this whole time. Enthralled. Fascinated. Happy. Excited. Elated. Overjoyed. Ready to take on a mountain of work that once mocked me, but shall now be conquered in a flurry of keystrokes and mouse clicks, and a handy little device I shall now call: “friend.”

(That, folks, is a genuine James moment: super happy!  And…cheesy…but that’s the real me.)

Would I buy Magic Article Rewriter again, given the chance? Oh, gosh yes. It’s superb, despite its navigation issues. Another benefit is that you can take it anywhere, regardless of internet connection. TBS is portable but you need an internet connection, and so you may or may not have latency issues – I don’t have any problems when I’m at home.

When I’m out at the day job on some unsecured WiFi eating a McDouble with extra pickles, well: me no likey. That’s not TBS’s fault, it’s Ronald McDonald’s crummy WiFi. By day 2, working on this project while “at work” in the family business/day job, I was having latency issues on that network and went back to MAR with no problem.

One last thought on the final score: I would sell my mother MAR in a heartbeat. I loved the software with the Magic Button, but TBS can really save me time if I use it without the avalanche of synonyms. (See correction above.) That may be a good thing if you don’t like to write, or if you are doing some speed re-writes. The Best Spinner lives up to its name, and even offers their own article directory (it’s not very big from the looks of it, but I’ll be using it nonetheless in the future, especially since the name of the game with TBS is “constant improvement” – it can only get better from here with their article directory).

I’ll be buying the Magic Article Submitter soon, and will give you a report on the results I see – in the meantime, you aren’t wasting your money either way. The Best Spinner has an annual fee of $77, but to try them out since it’s only $7 for 7 days — and if you don’t like it, you can have your money back in 30 days.

One last feature I’ll mention, but doesn’t apply to me: The Best Spinner integrates with SENuke for you nukers out there. That’s the good stuff.

10-5-10 Update: Please Read an Update On Spinners at My Lens:

See my new Top 3 Article Spinners review. And note – The Best Spinner is hard to top…but…well. Just read the review.