■ Career Profile
Target Group: Time-rich, young people with a penchant for novel things; mostly young men.
Content: Completion of various tasks requested by clients within the realm of moral boundaries.
Investment: Time and physical effort, no basic capital required.
Income: 2000 RMB per month, equivalent to part-time work for students.
Some people have money, others have leisure time. The former use money to buy time, while the latter use their time to make money. This situation has given rise to a new profession — online hourly workers who sell their time in minutes or hours on the internet to provide services to buyers, including baby product agents.
Services offered are varied, ranging from running errands and accompanying shopping trips to maintaining QQ accounts, stealing vegetables on Happy Farms, and even writing online love letters to an employer's secret crush.
Pricing: Online procurement service costs 10 RMB per task.
The pioneer of online hourly workers was a female Beijinger who years ago sold her "spare life" on the Tianya Community forum.
Thanks to this trailblazing woman, being an online hourly worker has now become a common way to earn extra income, with many practitioners being young men. A search for "hourly worker" on Taobao yields over four thousand results. In one Mr. Zhao's online shop, the following service is listed: "Online hourly worker, tasks that can be completed online after discussion. Please do not disturb for illegal or immoral requests." According to some online shops' price lists, space stomping, voting, forum posting cost 0.1 RMB per instance, online data collection, MP3/music downloads, movie downloads range from 0.5 to 2 RMB per instance, typing costs 1 RMB per thousand words, and online procurement costs 10 RMB per instance.
Income: Earning 2000 RMB by helping others with flash purchases
Since the commodity sold by online hourly workers is time, those who engage in this line of work must have spare time. Tasks like searching for materials, text formatting, purchasing train tickets on behalf of others, and downloading songs or movies are mostly "contracted" by university students, while tasks requiring long online hours such as maintaining QQ accounts or stealing vegetables on Happy Farm are undertaken by office clerks who spend all day in front of computers.
On Taobao, the most popular online hourly worker service is assisting with flash purchases of discounted goods. This is not only due to the need for timing but also because of the high skill level required. On a seasoned seller's webpage, there were over 1200 orders for flash purchase assistance within a month. Xiao Zou, a fan of flash purchases, often finds a friend who runs an online store to schedule the listing of an item so he can practice his flash purchase skills. Over time, he became known among his friends as a flash purchase expert. Eventually, Xiao Zou decided to become a flash purchase hourly worker.
"Depending on the difficulty, I can charge between 5 to 50 RMB per task. If everything goes smoothly, earning 2000 RMB a month is not a problem. Flash purchases really test one's mental acuity and vision. Although success may come down to just a few minutes, preparation must begin much earlier, understanding when sellers typically offer 'flash deals'. Additionally, this job requires high-quality computer hardware and network environment," Xiao Zou explained.
Fun: Being inspired by creative work
A part-time hourly worker named Ye Zi told reporters that despite earning only 10 RMB per hour, she often receives interesting tasks. "Once, a boy paid me 500 RMB to post his confession of unrequited love on 50 different forums and collect blessings from 100 netizens. In the end, the girl was moved, and I also felt the joy of this work."
(Source: Beijing Morning Post)
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