Intro: According to a big data research project by Liepin [China’s largest online job posting and headhunting site] titled “Post-90s Workplace Insight Report 2020,” nearly 50 percent of the post-90s generation have side jobs. Among those who have started some sort of side hustle, most are in WeChat businesses, freelance writing, purchasing, design, and home tutoring. With the COVID-19 pandemic keeping the vast majority of people at home, many have begun to seek out ways to earn extra cash, and various WeChat online courses have sprung up that teach new skills. There are many things to be wary of in these online classes, however, and questions remain like how many people can learn a skill from them and actually make extra money. We chatted with some WeChat online class students, teaching assistants, and teachers to find out. In 2020, you may have been unemployed or working from home, but you very likely came across various side hustle advertisements on your social media feed. With the pandemic raging, traditional industries have been hit hard and various side businesses have sprung up like bamboo shoots after a rainstorm. On official social media accounts, Moments, Xiaohongshu (or RED, a social media and e-commerce platform], and Weibo you can always see the tempting words "side business" and "cash in.” What's more tempting is that many of these side hustles that can bring in extra income claim to be for "absolute beginners.” Regardless of your status and background, as long as you learn from the teacher in class, you can make a profit! Qianchao––one of the most active pay-for-knowledge platforms in mainland China––has opened a special column called the Cash in Course. Among the multitude of cash in courses, the most prominent are in the copywriting, dubbing, as well as film editing industries. "Young mothers with zero experience, earn 8,000 cash per month by copywriting!" "I have a baby at home, I rely on copywriting to achieve economic freedom." "If you have a voice, you’ll have wealth. Have you missed the opportunity to work in the latest industry with an hourly salary of 200 yuan?" But are these side hustle courses actually profitable? Your author personally enrolled in one of these courses and interviewed veteran classmates to discuss issues of the most popular side business cash in classes. A circle of enrollment: Moments to WeChat groups "Side job classes are good for earning money; of course they’re very profitable, but they’re a great way for teachers to earn money. It has nothing to do with the students!" Ms. K said seriously. "In the era of online classes, you can definitely learn a lot of things from them, but be careful. ‘Cash in courses’ are almost always like cutting chives (referring to how quickly chives grow back after harvesting, much like students in an online learning course will quickly be replaced by eager new students, allowing teachers to make a quick profit)." A veteran student of online courses, she became interested in side job courses as early as 2019 and has spent over 100,000 yuan on them. However, when it comes to the amount of her earnings, K did not disclose specifics, only answering with two words: "Ha ha." She has participated in various cash in classes, including but not limited to: copywriting, personal styling, video editing, and most recently voice coaching. She expressed that these courses vary greatly. Some teachers really do teach well and have things to share that can improve students even if they can’t be monetized. However, some teachers just round up some contacts from their network, hire a group of paid bloggers to stir up the atmosphere, and then coax everyone into buying courses. In fact, you can teach pretty much anything online if someone is looking for it. The general practice is to post an ad costing 999 yuan for a public class to their friends on Moments, start to add people into their WeChat group, join the group discussion on the topic, and then start formal registration for said class. The cheapest cash in classes cost upwards of 1,000 yuan. With the help of a friend, I participated in a free public class called “The Secrets of Cashing in on a Xiaohongshu [RED] Side Business.” The terms for joining the class were forwarded on Moments and claimed to have only 100 places. After joining the group, the administrator issued a very detailed announcement. First, congratulating everyone for winning a place and becoming the lucky ones who have the honor to attend the class. Next, suggesting that everyone take notes, be friendly and interact, and inviting everyone to attend the class at 8 pm. It felt like a very studious atmosphere. Under the administrator’s guidance, at least 20 people began to write the words “8 p.m., see you there.” At 8 p.m., the teacher arrived. By this time, there were about 200 people in the group. After a flood of welcoming remarks for the teacher, he began the lecture. The teacher first introduced what side jobs are, emphasizing that side hustles can help young mothers realize wealth and freedom, allow students to earn spending money, and let office workers double their income. The teacher introduced his company, and then posted a series of pictures, showing examples of income from previous students. I looked at the course name and then at the tempting screenshots flashing across the screen and started to look forward to learning these secrets. Next, the teacher began to introduce the course. There were two courses. One was the copywriting course, 1,999 yuan/person; the other was the advanced blogger course for 999 yuan/person. The copywriting class mainly taught how to look at briefs, write soft ads in Xiaohongshu, and do simple cell phone drawing. The advanced blog master class taught how to create a personal Xiaohongshu account from the ground up. A, invitations for students to sign up began. The public class lasted for over an hour. I listened to the chat record two or three times and made sure no details were omitted: the so-called "secret book" was to participate in the paid courses. If you participate in the 1,999 yuan copywriting class, can you really find a side job and earn an extra 6,000 per month? These free open classes are all the same. Don’t expect to hear any knowledge or substance, as in the end, they all lead you to joining the paid class. The norm of cutting chives: Expensive course fees and cheap labor Many people believe the propaganda, and Ms. Yang was one of them. She spent 2,999 yuan on a reading and writing cash in class. The teacher said that she would earn a fee by condensing articles (summarizing the content of a book in one article), each article earning her as much as 500 yuan. After two months in class, with homework due twice a week, Ms. Yang said that she did make great progress in her writing, but she didn’t get a dime for her work. "Many teachers claim that they have contacts with official accounts or magazines when, in fact, they don’t. They take students’ articles and just pass them to their counterparts. It’s no different from going out and submitting papers yourself. There are more than 200 people in a course, and each time if there are one to two students that are selected and actually earn a stipend then that’s not too bad." Ms. Yang added, "So don't believe that you can make money from this. You won't even make back your tuition, unless you write very well." She laughed. "But people who write particularly well have already made money from writing. How can this be called an absolute beginner writing class?" Xiao Lu has a different attitude. Unlike Ms. Yang, the absolute beginner and mother, Xiao Lu is a college student and has a foundation in writing. She was in the same class as Ms. Yang, and was one of the few people in the class who received compensation for her articles. She said that the purpose of applying for a class was not to learn writing, but to use the teacher’s connections. If you submitted your work to an official account by yourself, you would have to compete with several hundred, or even thousands of, people, but if the teacher had the right connections, you would just compete with one or two hundred classmates. Some of them were still complete novices with no foundation in writing, so it’s easier to be selected. Xiao Lu claimed that through the introduction of her teacher, she was paid an article fee twice, both times for summarizing articles, each with about 2,000 words and pictures. It took more than three days to read the whole book and summarize it. I asked her how much she made from each article, and she said 200 one time and 150 the other. I found online that the fee for summarized articles are generally over 300, with the highest priced at 1,000. In addition to expensive course fees, cheap labor seems to be the norm in this industry. Hailan participated in a short, copywriting training camp costing 999 yuan. The teacher gave students the opportunity to take on a draft, usually writing copy for WeChat Moments, or to write in Xiaohongshu or Zhihu, another popular forum website. Hailan revealed that for a 500-character survey-plus-picture in Xiaohongshu, you get a minimum of five yuan and a maximum of 30 yuan. Zhihu pays a bit more, usually 50-150 yuan because you have to write more specialized, authentic answers. Moments pays about 5 yuan. "How many people participated?" "A lot, many people think it doesn't matter; they can just spend one to two hours writing and they’ll have money to collect.” "How much do you earn every month?" "My highest income has been 300, and among our classmates the highest pay someone got was 500." Hailan added, "I wrote 15 articles and stayed up all night to write that month." So, what they’re saying on the posters, are there really people who can earn more than 6,000 yuan a month after taking these classes? Teaching assistants with a monthly income of several thousand are still chives Hard work pays off. After more than half a year, I contacted a person who achieved earning a monthly income of more than 5,000 yuan through a cash in class. Her name is Qingqing. Qingqing participated in the Xiaohongshu copywriting training course. Through her own determination, she first became the teacher’s assistant with a monthly income of 1,000 yuan. She was responsible for helping the teacher manage class registration and later for the training camps. Later, she joined a copywriting company and became an online worker––a member of Xiaohongshu’s customer service project, responsible for contacting bloggers, finding writers, and connecting with customers. Her monthly salary is linked to the amount of customer orders. When customers cancel their orders, her salary stops. The minimum salary she earns is 2,000 yuan and the maximum is 7,000 yuan. But Qingqing doesn't consider this a side job. This job takes up all of her time - to the extent that she ends up talking with her teacher (who also happens to be her boss) on the phone at midnight. This in reality has become her main job. The first time I chatted with Qingqing was in September 2020. Qingqing believed that online work was the future for job prospects, and sincerely appreciated her teacher for giving her the opportunity to join the company. She said that when the company was established in early 2020, there were about 7-8 instances in which students changed to staff positions. Their first two customers didn’t pay because it was “teacher training,” and their commissions only started being counted after the third order. It took her two and a half months working full-time to get her first paycheck. It was for 3,000 yuan. By the end of December, Qingqing became the most senior employee of the team, with an average monthly income of 5,000 yuan. However, in January this year, the company suddenly announced that it would cancel all online employee operations and switch to offline in-person operations. All online employees who had signed up could continue to work for the company, but there would be no more commissions. At that moment, Qingqing felt that she had indeed been harvested like chives. "At the beginning of last year, as the epidemic broke out, the company could not start its offline operations, so I looked for online work. The company was put back on track, the customers stabilized, and then the epidemic situation eased up. They thought online work was too difficult to manage and suddenly canceled all of it," Qingqing said. She revealed that her workload and working hours online far exceed those in the same industry and position in Shenzhen. "There are three to four video conferences a week, and sometimes I have to answer the teacher's phone call at 10 p.m., and it’s almost being on 24-hour standby." Qingqing stated, "I’m starting to think, this is just like a full-time job, and I’m gradually getting on track. It’s not bad to earn a few thousand a month. But the company has no guarantees for online personnel. I remember that there was a month when there were tons of orders. My commission should have been 17,000 yuan, but the company looked for an excuse and cut it down to 9,000 yuan. Now it even more directly says it won’t give us commissions but told us to still contact bloggers and write articles. In fact, the working hours have not been reduced, but I can’t get a guarantee for a monthly salary." In response to this issue, she sought out the teacher who took her on at the time, and the teacher responded: "This is the company's normal schedule, and offline companies will adjust their positions according to their needs. This is a very reasonable thing to do." She plans to settle up on her projects with the company before Spring Festival, and then leave completely to find an offline job. According to Qingqing, she is actually fortunate to be in her situation. Some online colleagues have begun to encounter delays from the company in paying their final salaries for various reasons. “I used to say that if a project finished really well, there would be a bonus. As a result, now assessments and audits are starting to appear. Anyway, it was a very simple thing. Now it has been done for a long time." Before hanging up the phone, she gave me a piece of advice: "Don't believe in any of these cash in, side hustle classes. They’re mostly fake, or maybe the teachers are fake." I kept asking, but she refused to say anything more, and only introduced me to a classmate who had also been a teaching assistant, Xiao Jianbing. Xiao Jianbing also left this circle not long ago. She also switched from being a student to a teaching assistant. She gave the same advice as Qingqing: "The more you emphasize cashing in, the more danger there is. If you want to learn something, honestly just attend an official copywriting course online, which may not give you any channels to make money, but at least a legitimate teacher will instruct you." Xiao Jianbing said that after she became a teaching assistant, she discovered that many teachers use articles written by their assistants. When the teacher is in class, they will use the voice bar in WeChat groups to read the textbook prepared by the teaching assistant, and then assign homework from that. For every class of more than 100 students, they will select only one to two students to give personal comments to, and all the rest of the comments will come from the teaching assistant. Most of the teaching assistants are students from the previous course, generally without any academic background or copywriting experience. Xiao Jianbing said that she was a mother herself, and she had never been involved in copywriting before, but because she was selected by the teacher for her diligence and initiative, she began to write the class preparation materials. The same class content will be used again in the next semester, so the materials do not need to be revised. If the teacher starts up a new class, such as last year’s popular Xiaohongshu copywriting and Moments copywriting courses, the teaching assistant searches for information online and prepares lesson content all over again. Xiao Jianbing’s job was to write articles and correct homework, sometimes correcting more than 50 copies a night, and she had only three months from her initial introduction to copywriting in class to then correcting copywriting homework. Mothers and college students, the best chives they can see "This has become an industry with no way to supervise it." Ms. K, who had signed up for the 100,000 yuan course, laughed at my naivety. “It’s not only like this for the copywriting class, but also for dubbing. I met a teacher once, and she directly would take dubbings from other teacher’s recorded dubbing lessons and play them back to me––even the sound of her voice in the lesson was not her own! As long as she has thick skin and dark hands, she has a lot of chives waiting to come to class. For example, I’m one of them." She said that the dubbing cash in class is similar to the copywriting method: first use free lessons to attract people to the group, and then promote the paid course. The basic introductory dubbing course is about 2,000 yuan, and there are special dubbing courses, such as voice coaching, reading articles, CV, etc., which generally range about 3,000-5,000 yuan for each class. In the voice classes that K has taken, apart from the above-mentioned teacher who was particularly bad, the others were actually pretty good. At least the things they taught are real, but there are a few monetization channels. There are only a few lucky people who can become example cases of success. I have tried to contact cash in course teachers from various industries, but most of them refused to comment or refused to accept interviews. I interviewed a teacher S who has a good reputation in the community. S is "famous" among students as a genuine person. The truth is that S gives introductions into cash in channels, and invites people in advertising, media, and journalism to attend class and give lectures. Regarding student comments that this industry varies widely and haphazardly cuts down chives, S said he could only do his job so well, but he did not agree with the argument of cheap labor. "A total novice who does not have any cases should cherish every job opportunity instead of being picky about the pay. You must know that such mothers, students, and novices have no cases of their own, and they cannot access any network without going through their teachers. So don’t worry about wages at the beginning; even if it’s free, do it. Only after accumulating certain case experiences can you start to talk about whether it is cheap or not. If you don’t even have a job opportunity, then there is fundamentally no value at all." S has a client network of his own, and he will select work from the students’ products and pay them a fee. I have seen contracts of clients posted in S’ Moments. Reportedly business turnover in 2020 reached 2 million. The article compensation he gave to his students was higher than the article fee Xiao Lu received, with an average of 50-80 yuan per article. Another teacher, who did not want to be named, when he learned that online students such as Qingqing were treated as cheap labor, thought that the company’s approach was relatively conscientious: “In fact, they were nothing at the beginning, a group of unemployed moms who couldn’t find jobs and nothing more. The company gave you training and paid you a salary where you can get several thousand yuan a month. What else do you want?" This is common: the mindsets of side job teachers and students are very different. Students’ willingness to pay for knowledge does not mean that they are willing to provide free or low-cost labor. They still hope that their contribution is proportional to their gains; meanwhile teachers or companies that carry out side hustle courses believe that the employment opportunities provided are also a benefit, and that students’ work experience should also be paid accordingly (such as money, time, or free and cheap labor). Qingqing and Xiao Jianbing both mentioned that in the side hustle copywriting class, many student writings were directly taken by the teacher and given to customers for commercial use. Some were completely free, and some were given only a few yuan for the draft. The teacher will even make articles assigned by a company as homework assignments to the students, and the teacher’s tone is: “Don’t worry about gains and losses, this is for you to exercise opportunities and accumulate case experience.” In addition to copywriting classes, with the rise of short videos, the demand for video editors and illustrators is also increasing, and related side hustle cash in courses are born. Compared with copywriting and dubbing courses, these two have a relatively better reputation. Most students of these courses say that they can learn editing and drawing skills in the course, but there are also times where you attend a class but are not able to cash in on it, not to mention the awkward situation of thousands of part-time positions not paying enough to earn back tuition. With the advent of the online class era, online work and slashes to the workforce may become a prevailing trend. According to various students and teachers, the two groups of full-time mothers and current students are the main components of cash in classes. Ms. K's self-deprecating statement is, "My kind of full-time mother, who has a lot of free time and wants to earn some lipstick money, is simply the best chive in their eyes." Even though she laughs at herself like this, Ms. K still roams through a lot of side hustle classes. When asked for the reason, she said she still wants to try new things and learn because there are always teachers with a relatively good "conscience". Although there may not be networks, she can still learn some knowledge and skills. She still hopes that one day she will be able to apply this knowledge to at least make back her tuition fees.
