A recent phenomenon has quietly entered public consciousness: According to the China Writers Association, as of 2023, over 32 million people in China have written online novels at some point. That’s roughly the population of a large country, all trying to string words together on platforms like Qidian, Jinjiang, and others. And every year, millions more join.
But here’s the thing most people don’t realize. The vast majority of these writers never finish a single story. And of those who do, only a tiny fraction—about 1% by most estimates—earn enough to cover even basic living expenses. The rest? They become what insiders call “fuel for the algorithm”: they write thousands of words, generate content for readers to scroll through, receive little to no payment, and eventually burn out and quit.
You might think this is a tragedy. Yet if you look closely, there’s a more nuanced picture. For every person who drops out, another quietly discovers that the real value wasn’t the money. It was the process of writing itself.
Let’s unpack this.
The two kinds of online writers
Imagine two people. One is determined to “hit it big” — they chase trending genres, copy popular formulas, and obsess over daily word counts. Their motivation is purely external: money, fame, or validation. They write for three months, get stuck, and abandon the project. Then they start a new one. After a year, they have 30 unfinished novels and a lot of frustration. They burn out. They were fuel.
The second person treats writing like a personal practice. They choose a story they genuinely care about, set a sustainable pace, and focus on improving their craft sentence by sentence. They still want readers, but they don’t let the scoreboard define their progress. After a year, they might still have a small audience, but they’ve written 400,000 words — and dramatically improved their ability to think clearly, structure arguments, and express complex ideas. They’ve become better thinkers. They’ve been training.
This is not idealism. Research in cognitive psychology supports it. When you write regularly — especially narrative or persuasive writing — you strengthen the brain’s executive functions: attention control, planning, and impulse inhibition. You also build what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “slow thinking” capacity: the ability to step back, consider alternatives, and make better decisions. The act of constructing a story with a beginning, middle, and end forces you to organize chaos into order. And that skill transfers directly to work, communication, and problem-solving.
The surprise is that even the “burnout” writers often gain something. Many go into marketing, content creation, or education. They’ve internalized how to hook an audience with an opening line, how to build tension across paragraphs, how to make a point feel inevitable. They just don’t recognize it as a skill because they were too busy chasing the wrong metric.
The real trap: the wrong metric
Most people fail at online writing because they measure success in the wrong unit. They measure by “money per month” or “number of readers.” Those are outcome metrics — they come late and are heavily influenced by luck and market timing. The better metric is “skills per chapter” or “insights per session.” When you focus on skill development, the outcomes become byproducts.
There’s a famous story in the writing community about an author who spent three years writing a novel that got rejected by every publisher. He then wrote a second novel in six months — with the same effort and attention. That second book sold millions. What changed? Not his talent. He had learned to edit, to recognize structural flaws, to kill his darlings. The first three years were not wasted; they were an apprenticeship.
What this means for you
If you’re one of the millions thinking about jumping into online writing, you have a choice. You can become fuel — throwing yourself at the machine, hoping to be the one who wins the lottery. Or you can practice a craft, with no guarantee of fame, but with a guaranteed improvement of your mind.
And maybe that’s the deeper purpose of the 32 million phenomenon. Not to produce bestsellers, but to produce better thinkers. Most will quit. Some will keep writing. A few will realize that the real prize isn’t the contract or the reader count. It’s the quiet transformation that happens along the way.
The fuel burns. The training lasts.