I Made $20,000 on Tomato. Then I Watched It Choose AI Over Writers.

On September 7, Tomato released new rules.

I was lurking in several writers’ groups. Messages came one after another. Some posted screenshots. Some cursed. Some said, “I’m done writing.” I checked my own dashboard. August earnings: 100 yuan. Around Chinese New Year, it was still 5,000 a month. I had one or two million-word books. I ran them for a year or two. Now this.

Qidian is killing AI. In August, it delisted 27 works with average subscriptions over 10,000. About 100 were cleared from the top 1,000 on the monthly ticket list. The move was hard. Tomato’s new rules look like they are cleaning up AI. In practice, they push bottom-tier writers out the door.

The difference comes from the business model.

Qidian kills AI because readers pay

Qidian runs on paid subscriptions. Readers pay to read. Authors get a share. The platform takes a cut. In that loop, AI slop is poison. It is mass-produced, cheap, and endless. Once it floods the bookstore, readers cannot find good books. They stop spending. If readers stop spending, authors stop writing. The platform loses revenue.

So Qidian has to kill it. What it kills is not AI. It is slop that steals money. Delisting 27 and clearing 100 tells paying readers that human-written work still exists here. That signboard cannot fall.

Tomato is ambiguous because advertisers pay

Tomato is free reading. Readers do not pay. The platform earns from ads. It cares about daily active users, time spent, and ad impressions. AI writing varies in quality, but it is cheap and massive. It fills the bookstore. It gives users something to scroll. It makes the platform look content-rich.

The longer users scroll, the more ads they see. The more ads they see, the more the platform earns. So Tomato’s attitude toward AI has always been ambiguous. It does not have to quit AI the way Qidian does. It even needs AI to maintain content scale.

The problem starts when AI writing meets studio botting.

How botting kills normal authors

From July to September, studios were botting hard. Here is what I heard. Studios open thousands or tens of thousands of accounts and brush traffic in the bookstore. When they see their own AI writing, they click in. When they see other books, they swipe away. Result: a LV5 author launches a new book, and bookstore traffic is 0. Normal writers during book testing get 0 traffic. After that, they get no recommendation traffic. The book dies.

On the reader side, the homepage only shows AI writing. Tomato is free, but scrolling through AI writing is disgusting. Traffic drops. Fewer people means fewer ads. Then everyone dies together.

At that time, a studio called Jiuzhou was active. What did Jiuzhou start with? Rewriting and plagiarism. It recruited small writers everywhere, preparing to attack Tomato. Small writers rewrote content. They batch-posted to Tomato. Operations used bots to brush traffic. The studio paid the small writers. At the time, people said it wanted to recruit 5,000 people to snipe Tomato. At the same time, it heard internal news: Qidian had started beheading all AI writing.

A month passed. For August’s new books, among authors I know, 99% had very little bookstore traffic. I was saying Tomato had gone crazy. Then on September 7, the new rules came out.

New rules: not killing AI, but screening super-producers

The new rules in simple terms:

• The full-attendance bonus starts from the first month of signing. Listen/read revenue must be at least 500 yuan. Monthly update: 150,000 words.

• After three months, to get the full-attendance bonus, listen/read revenue must be at least 1,500 yuan. Monthly update: 200,000 words.

Verification starts at 80,000 words. Before verification, where does traffic come from?

A monthly update of 150,000 words means 5,000 words a day. A Tomato chapter is about 2,000 words. So each chapter must be over 2,500 words. You cannot take leave. Take one day off, and the next day you must update 10,000 words.

After three months, a monthly update of 200,000 words means 6,666 words a day. By my writing habit, 2,000 words per chapter, that is at least 4 chapters a day.

Many novices say Tomato is cleaning up AI.

No.

A normal person writes by hand, updates 8,000 words a day, and still earns 1,500 yuan a month under studio siege. How many people can do that? This abandons normal bottom-tier writers. Mid-to-upper-tier earnings are shrinking too.

Tomato has thrown in with AI and studios. This update benefits studios. Studios can mass-produce, bot traffic, and pass the threshold. Writers who work by hand cannot.

Tomato is already hell mode.

Feedback loop: AI writes, AI reads

Tomato is in a feedback loop. AI writes. AI reads. Over time, advertisers see that they spent money on Tomato and got no humans. They stop buying traffic. Then Tomato dies.

Hongguo’s short dramas are mass-produced AI from studios. But human imagination is infinite. AI can never imagine what it has never seen. Humans can. Ordinary people eat too much AI, and eventually everyone despises cookie-cutter AI writing.

Tomato is struggling on its deathbed. The new executive Tomato hired first killed Zhangyue, then killed Feilu, and now comes to kill Tomato.

Tomato let me earn ten or twenty thousand yuan. I only write farming and slice-of-life stories. I am still grateful to Tomato. So, goodbye.

The way out for writers who work by hand

If you want to write novels as a side job, Tomato is purgatory. Hone your craft. Go to other sites. I swear, writing on Douban is better than writing on Tomato.

Sites for handwritten novels will get new opportunities. After the cold winter, spring comes.

Qidian kills AI because readers pay. It has to protect original work.

Tomato is ambiguous because readers are free. It needs massive content to maintain ad time.

Free is not an excuse. AI is not an answer. When a platform treats creators as fuel, readers as traffic, and advertisers as marks, the system eventually backfires.

Good stories come from human imagination. AI can imitate. It cannot create what has never existed. Humans can.

If you still write by hand, do not waste yourself on Tomato. Go where stories are respected. Go where readers will pay for your words. It may be hard at first. Income may be slow. At least every word you write is your own.

For those still writing by hand.