The pitch
The banner read, roughly: “Hello friend — no website? No problem. Join Chuangye Lianmeng for free and earn anyway.” Members earned small amounts for clicking advertisements, signing up to advertisers’ offers and reading paid emails, and were paid weekly in cash by Alipay or bank card.
The numbers it published
Clicks were worth about 0.02–0.05 yuan, sign-ups 0.5–2 yuan, and paid emails 0.02–0.10 yuan. Ordinary members could request payment at a 5-yuan balance (the FAQ) or 15 (the benefits page — the two pages disagreed). Paying 20 yuan per level bought one-to-five-star membership, which lowered the payout threshold, multiplied the value of each click and assigned “random downlines”.
Six levels of downline
Referral commissions ran six levels deep — 10%, 5%, 4%, 3%, 2% and 1% in the FAQ; 8% at the top in the benefits page. A referral contest started on May 26, 2006, paying 10 yuan a week and 50 a month to whoever recruited most. The site claimed a founding date of February 14, 2003, which no archive supports.
Advertising rates
Advertisers could buy paid emails (200 one-fen emails for 6 yuan), click campaigns (1,000 half-fen clicks for 8 yuan), homepage banners by impression, and text or logo placements by the month. Payment was by six Chinese banks, PayPal, e-gold, MoneyBookers or StormPay, or by postal order to an address on Ping’an Street, Shijiazhuang.
What happened to it
Captures run from April to June 2006. A referral link requested in January 2007 returned 404, and by then the homepage was an expired-domain page. The software was a stock Chinese PTC package; the same template offered copies for sale at 20 yuan a set. Programs of this kind were common in 2006 and most did not pay for long. This site does not operate one, and /ads/ now redirects here.