Earning money from Paid-To-Click (PTC) advertisements
11-10-2014 | IslamWeb
Question:
Esselamu aleikum, Recently I send question here and I get this answer : https://www.islamweb.net/en/fatwa/2511569 But that answer is about HYIP programs/sites which offer money only for investing money, sometimes they offer paid to click or surf ads but that is just to cover the real truth and they are haram. My question is about PTC(Paid To Click) sites. There are two type of PTC sites, Investment and NON-Investment. My question is only for NON-Investment PTC sites. There are Advertisers and Members. Advertisers advertise their sites and we, Members, are getting paid to click it, some percentage of what they paid for advertising it. Members earn for clicking ads. Also there are 2 more options for earning money. First is to bring Direct Referrals to register on PTC site under your name and get paid when they click ads. Second option is to Rent Referrals for 30 days, 60 days, etc, and that is mostly for members that dont have skill in bringing referrals. For example, one referral cost 0.2 dallars for 30 days and if he click everyday for 30 days you could earn up to 0.4 dollar. To cashout earned money members dont need to invest anything because everybody get FREE membership when he register. There are also other membership which are not free and they have cost(for example 20 dollars for 180 days). People who have lot of skill upgrade on higher membersips. Higher memberships have lot of features than free membership, they have higher commission per clicking ads and per referral clicks, possibility to bring bigger number of referrals or to rent bigger number of referrals and many other features. I already asked one master and one hafiz about this and they say that by all Ulema this PTC job is Halal if advertisements are Halal. But I wanted to ask you, is this Job Halal? It is very importing for me to know is it haram or not because I help my parents with money I earn from this ptc sites. May Allah reward you
Answer:
All perfect praise be to Allaah, The Lord of the Worlds. I testify that there is none worthy of worship except Allaah, and that Muhammad, sallallaahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, is His slave and Messenger.
We will summarize our answer to the issue you are asking about in the following points:
1- The subscription being free and the advertisements that the subscriber takes a fee for browsing through being lawful advertisements that do not involve something objectionable, there is no harm in it.
2- Bringing a member for browsing through the ads (clicking on the ads) as you explained, and the site taking a commission for it, there is no harm in that either.
3- As regards buying customers or buying their clicking on the ad, then it seems that it is based upon risk because the reality of purchasing or leasing a member involves either gambling or risk. The amount which the buyer or the leaser pays, he pays it to the site against them clicking on the ads, which depends on his luck, and he does not know how many times they will click on the ad, so the amount of his profit is risked if he really buys the clients, and it is a risk with greater reason if this is not the case.
4- Buying the membership or promoting it is not permissible because of what we explained in Point 3 above.