Making Money on the Internet
Entering my forties, the arrogant bravado of my youth has faded away. Earning money to support my family has become life’s top priority. I’ve gradually lost patience for things I can’t achieve no matter how hard I try. Over a decade ago, the internet boom was surging forward — new websites and apps emerging endlessly, and everyone was being either embraced or swept along by it. I thought this thriving momentum would last forever, so I actively tried to brush against the edges of the internet. But whatever I studied, I always gave up halfway. Even now, all I can really do is set up a VPS to run a proxy, unlock streaming media, build websites with open-source programs, modify templates, tweak skins, and so on. Apart from making a few tens of thousands of yuan from a couple of websites, none of my other skills found much use as mobile internet rapidly took over.
After giving up on tinkering, I got into e-commerce — a bit busier, and I also do online recruitment. Unexpectedly, a website I built in 2020 has been generating a steady income — several thousand yuan a year. Meanwhile, the server costs only a few hundred yuan. So that server has been running stably for years without ever updating its content. This experience gave me an insight: perhaps the wider we spread our information across the internet, the more likely we are to earn something. Even if there’s no result for half a year or more, one lucky break could bring enough profit to last a while.
Once, I encountered my cousin using Douyin (TikTok) as a search engine, and I was astonished. I never expected that the proud Baidu — once the information center of the internet — would be beaten so badly by Douyin. It’s possible that mainstream internet users today never even open a search engine anymore. Their information basically comes from Weibo, Douyin, or WeChat. And with algorithms in play, they only see what the algorithm thinks they want to see. What was once an open internet has now become isolated information islands, barely communicating with each other. In these islands, if we don’t feed information in, consumers will never find us. So I started posting soft advertisements across many platforms — just simple status updates. Half a year later, a customer contacted me. Over time, he bought over a hundred thousand yuan worth of products. Compared to the little time I initially invested, the income was explosively impressive.
Looking to the future, I believe the next traffic windfall might be artificial intelligence (AI). AI tools like ChatGPT can already be used as search engines. If phone manufacturers combine voice assistants with AI features, users could easily access all kinds of information through voice. This means AI engines can also be leveraged for promotion — as long as we create enough pages on the internet for AI to crawl, we can achieve our promotional goals. This is similar to internet promotion strategies from over a decade ago, except this time the target is AI.