Interesting story of how it took close to zero effort to make $1100 using the internet.
Imagine making money by writing questions.
Yes, questions!
That was the concept behind the Quora Partner Program.
Launched in 2018, this program provided a unique opportunity for users to earn money by simply leveraging their curiosity and knowledge. The Quora Partner Program invited selected users to join and get paid to ask questions. The idea was that high-quality questions would generate more traffic, leading to increased ad revenue for Quora. A portion of this revenue was then shared with the partners based on the engagement their questions received.
One fine day, I received a notification from Quora giving out an invite to earn money by writing questions for the Quora Partner Program. Without giving much thought I accepted the invite and started writing questions casually.
How It Worked
- Invitation-Based Entry: Not everyone could join the program. Users were invited based on their activity and contribution to the platform.
- Earnings Through Engagement: Partners earned money based on the number of advertisement views their questions received. The more engaging and popular a question, the higher the earnings.
- Payment Structure: The earnings accumulated in the partner’s account and were paid out monthly, provided a certain threshold was met.
- Encouraging Quality Content: The program encouraged users to think deeply and ask questions that would spark insightful answers and discussions, thereby increasing the overall value of the content on Quora.
A particular question quickly made more than $100 within a few days. It was almost like being paid to ask why the chicken crossed the road!
I started writing more and more questions. I was on a roll, or so I thought. But I made no money off a lot of questions. That was when I realized that “passive” income was supposed to be “passive” work and I went back to writing questions only when I got the ideas naturally — usually in the shower or when my brain was supposed to be solving coding problems.
I also did some manual work of sending out answer requests to writers in Quora. The limit to send answer requests was 2000 requests per day and 25 requests per question. But 2000 clicks a day manually? My fingers were not up for that and the ROI wasn’t good for the effort. This was when my Computer Science knowledge and degree came into the picture!
The following question struck me, “What if I can automate the clicks instead of executing manually?”.
Without thinking much, I started writing a script using Python to automate the clicks and I got a tool that tremendously reduced my efforts although I could not get the edge cases 100% correct. I also tried to automate the question-writing process by using AI tools, but AI wasn’t quite up to par back then. If only ChatGPT had been around, maybe my questions would have been goldmines of passive income!
Unfortunately, the Quora Partner Program was shut down effectively in September 2022 and I lost my source of passive income. But the best part about this program is I made money with minimal effort and I also learned a lot about online income and user dynamics in this fun journey.
The program and its rules were also simple. Although they closed the program abruptly and certain questions were not paid completely (users were paid the one-year advertisement revenue generated by their questions), Quora only stopped any potential future earnings and did not snatch away existing earnings like a lot of reputed platforms do for silly so-called “violations”.
The key takeaway from this story about online income is to find platforms that have simple rules for partners/affiliates and earn income using knowledge and skills from our everyday lives. Just remember, in the world of online income, passive can often mean you’re just passively waiting for the next program to shut down!
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