Watch videos, read novels, play games – and earn money, the ads say, some claiming RMB 80,000 a month and a new car from the proceeds. A Beijing Youth Daily reporter tested several of these apps and found the reality is all routine: ads throughout, withdrawal tasks that keep escalating, and a week of play worth a few dimes.
Withdrawal checkpoint after checkpoint
One user who downloaded a farm-planting game on the strength of its ads got a newcomer reward of just over one yuan – far less than advertised. Withdrawal is the hard part: new users get one chance at 0.3 yuan, then must keep signing in and clearing requirements. As many netizens quip, you would not pick a dime off the ground, but you will tap furiously for a cent online – the time spent is not even worth the data.
In the planting game, five harvests yield about 0.1 yuan in redeemable red packets plus in-game ‘banknotes’ for props; each level-up pays about 1 yuan. Withdrawal tiers run 0.5, 25, 50, 100, 200 and 500 yuan: the 0.5 tier takes two days of logins, and the very next tier is 25 yuan – at under 1 yuan per level, users need level 25 and then 10 days of check-ins, and then must recruit 10 new players before the money moves.
A free-novel app promised ‘read and earn, withdraw tens of yuan anytime’ with an 18-yuan newcomer red packet that opened to reveal 0.3 yuan. Each chapter pays 10 coins; 10,000 coins convert to 1 yuan. Extra tasks – logging in at set hours for 88 coins, browsing recommended books for 666, watching 60-second ads for 88 – pay better than reading. After two hours of task-completing, the reporter reached 0.3 yuan, then saw ‘today’s withdrawal chances are used up’.
Ads pile up regardless: full-screen interstitials every few chapters, with a 45-second ad buying 10 minutes of relief. Removing banner ads costs a VIP subscription – 3 yuan for 7 days promotional, 79 yuan for a year. By day four the 0.3-yuan option disappeared, the minimum now 1 yuan. By day seven, the account held 30,000 coins but withdrawal required 400 minutes of reading time, ad-watching excluded. A week in: 0.9 yuan.
Some downloads you never chose
In a guess-the-idiom game, every few levels forced a 20-second unskippable ad to ‘win stamina’ – and a careless tap could start downloading unknown software. Fortune coins from 30-second ads could be quintupled, but the daily bonus ran out after about an hour; on day seven coins stalled at 9,500 of the 10,000 needed for 1 yuan. Final total: 0.6 yuan.
A game whose ads promised ‘get rich overnight’ and monthly incomes of 50,000-80,000 yuan granted a 68-yuan newcomer red packet that required 200 yuan to withdraw – at 1-2 yuan per win, minus 2 per loss, and then 60 consecutive days of check-ins on top. Players report that after 60 days new conditions keep appearing.
The math is stark: each 40-second ad pays 500 withdrawal coins, 3,000 coins convert to 0.3 yuan, and even at five withdrawals a day for small amounts, over 13 hours of daily ad-watching earns about 59 yuan. Some people pay to remove ads; others watch ads to earn pennies.
False advertising and legal risk
Ren Guozheng, a researcher at the Central University of Finance and Economics, called the practice malicious marketing: using welfare and red packets as bait to inflate reads and exposure. Promising cash that never arrives is not just false advertising – and these apps target the elderly and minors especially, while registration harvests personal information that can leak or be sold if supervision is lax. Regulators, cyber-police and platforms should all enforce; where money flows appear, extra transfer restrictions borrowed from anti-fraud banking practice would help. For individuals: nothing falls from the sky, and any scheme touching money deserves extra caution.
Lawyer Zhao Jingpu of Dacheng Law Offices outlined three common models with different legal exposure. Paying old investors from new investors’ money to fake returns can constitute illegal absorption of public deposits. Recruitment-based rebates with more than three tiers of upline-downline relationships can constitute pyramid selling. Task-based earning paired with harvesting real names, phone numbers, ID numbers and addresses can lead to over-collection and profiting from leaked or sold personal data.
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