In the past few months, Cai Li, 63, earned hundreds of yuan ($30-40) from her leisure time at work and occasional sleepless nights, which she said would make a small contribution to her income.
Tencent's Interesting Title (QTT.O) attracts 20 million readers every day through its unusual payment strategy to point readers. The rankings show that the highest-paid users have received more than $50,000.
Digital gold coins are acquired by playing games, which include reading news and persuading others to join. Current exchange rate is 1,600 gold coins can be exchanged for 1 yuan, strong players can get the "Master" title.
Paying to attract readers is an extreme example of China's new generation of Internet companies, which shows that in order to build beachheads in a market dominated by larger rivals, the underachievers have adopted various financial incentives, such as discounts, coupons and so on.
Zhang Chenhao, executive director of Shanghai Jingchen Equity Investment Fund Management Co., Ltd., said, "If you want to compete for new customers with Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent and traditional mobile application companies, you have to come up with new strategies."
On the one hand, this method does work. The interesting headlines on the U.S. listing in September have tripled the number of users per day in the past year. Revenue in the third quarter -- almost entirely from advertising -- more than quintupled from the same period last year, approaching 1 billion yuan ($145 million).
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