DeepSeek Gold Rush: Earning a million a day, over 100 million in 20 days, who is being ripped off?

"The DeepSeek business boom brings both opportunities and traps." Why are there so many ways to make money in the gold rush caused by DeepSeek? Which are the real business opportunities and which are the hidden traps? How should people seek benefits and avoid harm in this boom to realize their own value?

How popular is DeepSeek? During the Spring Festival this year, Feng Ji, the producer of Black Myth: Wukong, praised DeepSeek as a national-level scientific and technological achievement, which made DeepSeek spread beyond the circle. As of press time, there were no less than 30 hot search topics. Not only that, DeepSeek has also set many records. According to QuestMobile data, DeepSeek surpassed Doubao in terms of daily active users for the first time on January 28, and then attracted 100 million users in the next 7 days, surpassing the user growth rate of ChatGPT and becoming the fastest growing Internet product in history.

Source: AI Product List

The popularity of DeepSeek has made many people see the huge commercial potential contained in it. For a time, various ways to make money around DeepSeek have sprung up like mushrooms after rain. For example, many people have seized the user's desire to learn more about DeepSeek, and put relevant courses on the knowledge payment platform. From basic operations to advanced applications, the course prices range from tens of yuan to hundreds of yuan. They made 200,000 yuan in 4 days. News like this is everywhere. What's more, some technical experts have packaged DeepSeek's usage skills into "rich secrets" through live teaching and community operations, attracting a large number of users to pay for learning. However, the commercial value of DeepSeek is far more than that. In content creation, e-commerce operations, or education and training, many people are using this AI tool to open up new ways to make money. There are even hardware manufacturers such as AI mice that claim to have access to DeepSeek, and their sales during the Spring Festival were close to 100 million yuan. DeepSeek has been regarded by many people as the "wealth code" in the AI ​​era.

There are many ways to make money, and the most profitable ones have earned hundreds of millions of yuan.

In the face of the public's attention and anxiety, the most popular and fastest way to make money using DeepSeek is to sell tutorials. On e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and Pinduoduo, searching for the keyword DeepSeek will display by default DeepSeek local deployment tutorials and learning videos from entry to mastery, with prices ranging from a few cents to more than ten yuan.

Note: Search results on e-commerce platforms.

Judging from the sales volume, DeepSeek's tutorials are very popular, and it is easy to break 100, 1,000, or even 10,000. A merchant on an e-commerce platform told Jingxuan AI that it is easy to break 1,000 by opening a tutorial store selling DeepSeek on Taobao with this wave of popularity. All you need to do is keep creating accounts and selling tutorials. The tutorials are bought from others, and the cost is very low. The key is that there is no limit on the purchased tutorials, so they can be sold repeatedly. Some people around me have made more than 100,000 in a week. In addition to selling tutorials, some people will also use DeepSeek to realize knowledge monetization, that is, sell courses. Because many ordinary people have only a superficial understanding of DeepSeek, if they want to obtain more relevant knowledge and commercial value, they need to spend money to ask people in the industry for advice. Jingxuan AI found that in Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and WeChat public accounts, as long as the relevant DeepSeek training courses are published, coupled with gimmicky titles such as making money and making money, they will attract a large number of users to like and follow, and the number of WeChat public accounts can easily break 100,000+.

For example, a live broadcast preview of "Using DeepSeek to Make Small Money Efficiently" released by a well-known knowledge payment platform WeChat account recently attracted more than 100,000 views in a short period of time. Generally, these training courses, conference videos or live broadcasts are sold, and the price ranges from a few yuan to 100 yuan.

Note: Screenshot from TikTok live broadcast.

Xiaolong, a businessman who has been engaged in online education for many years, told Jingxuan AI that they came into contact with this business at the end of last month. Since there was no ready-made DeepSeek to work with, they collected some knowledge from the domestic IT community and carefully created a series of courses covering DeepSeek basic operations, advanced applications and practical money-making skills. Each course is priced at 9.9 yuan, and more than 30,000 copies were sold in two weeks. There are also groups or private domain communities behind them. In these communities, they not only regularly share the use of DeepSeek, but also answer the problems encountered by students in the learning process in real time, enhance the students' learning experience and sense of participation, and increase the repurchase rate and reputation. It is worth noting that the traditional track has also been blessed by DeepSeek. Many people have reported that DeepSeek's metaphysical answers are better than many large models. So in Xiaohongshu, DeepSeek attracts batches of young people who are trying new things. Metaphysical merchants also use DeepSeek to celebrate the New Year. They use slogans such as AI stock trading, marriage prediction, and feng shui reading to broadcast live on the platform. Users reward them with gifts, and then use DeepSeek to calculate feng shui. Posting a blog post with the watch can get thousands of likes.

In addition to these conventional ways of making money, new business models have also emerged. It can be found that many hardware manufacturers have also joined the trend of using DeepSeek to make money. For example, a PC manufacturer has sold 130,000 copies of an AI mouse equipped with the DeepSeek-R1 model on the Douyin platform, and more than 220,000 copies have been sold on the entire network. The sales of this product on February 6th reached 750,000 to 1 million yuan, and the daily sales volume increased by nearly 100 times compared with January. In the more than 20 days since the Spring Festival, based on the post-coupon price of 369 yuan, the revenue of this mouse has reached 81.18 million yuan. Including offline channels, the revenue must have exceeded 100 million yuan.

The commercial value of DeepSeek goes far beyond the tool itself. It is more like a "wealth amplifier" that helps ordinary people realize cash at a lower cost and higher efficiency.

Is it really profitable or just a scam? Tsinghua professor refutes rumors of charging fees

It is undeniable that from the real cases reported in various news reports, DeepSeek can indeed bring considerable income to some people, but it is also full of people who use DeepSeek to make money. It can be found that on platforms such as Taobao, Xianyu, and Pinduoduo, there are some peripheral products related to DeepSeek, such as USB flash drives, headphones, notebooks, mouse pads, etc. printed with the DeepSeek logo. These products are advertised as having special "AI blessing" attributes that can improve the efficiency of users using DeepSeek. But in fact, these products are no different from ordinary peripheral products. They just use the popularity of DeepSeek to raise prices and harvest consumers' IQ taxes. Some marketing teams also claim to have mastered the exclusive secrets of using DeepSeek to create explosive content, and sell marketing plans to companies or self-media creators. They promise that as long as they follow the plan and use DeepSeek to generate content, they can easily get millions of traffic and tens of millions of exposures. However, these solutions are often just some general marketing rhetoric, without any substantial operational guidance. After users follow the solutions, they cannot achieve the expected results. Even the so-called exclusive secrets may come from a person who has just started his career and does not understand AI at all, wasting the cost of purchasing the solutions. In addition, some institutions and individuals have launched expensive DeepSeek training courses, claiming that they can enable students to become DeepSeek experts from scratch in just a few days. The price of the course may be as high as thousands of yuan. However, the training content is mostly basic knowledge that can be found everywhere on the Internet, and the training method is just simple video playback and a small number of case explanations. It is impossible for students to truly master the advanced applications of DeepSeek, let alone achieve the effects advertised by the course. The popular report "DeepSeek: From Entry to Mastery" made by Tsinghua University is a very detailed and high-quality teaching. However, many bloggers regard it as their own publicity and pay to sell it on their personal accounts. This prompted the production team of this report and Tsinghua professors to refute the rumor online: this report has been read more than 10 million times in a short period of time, and it has not been authorized to be sold by third parties. This report is free.

Note: The left one is released free of charge by the producer, and the right one is directed by a third party

A course seller said frankly: The courses sold for tens of thousands of yuan, the so-called DeepSeek dry goods courses, are all cases collected and pieced together on the Internet. More emotional value is provided to students in the course, telling them that DeepSeek can really make money, but how to make money ultimately depends on themselves. Some merchants also claim that they have DeepSeek's API interface, which can be provided to enterprises or developers to help them develop related applications. They sell these interfaces at high prices, ranging from thousands of yuan to tens of thousands of yuan. In fact, on February 6, DepSeek suspended the official API interface because the server was full. And so many companies in the market claim that they have DeepSeek API interfaces and can also provide recharge services. What's the matter? It turns out that among the models released with DeepSee R1, there are 6 open source small models that have been distilled from the inference data generated by R1. Their model names also contain R1, but they are very different from the full-blooded R1. The full-blooded R1 is 671B parameter size and requires 8 H100 graphics cards to run. Yuan Jinhui, founder of Silicon Mobility, has calculated that it would cost 5 million yuan to deploy 80 servers and run them for a month. However, if some service providers deploy some models with smaller parameters on the server and use them as full-powered R1s for external output services, the price can be set at the full configuration level, making a lot of money.

Many AI To C applications and SaaS products are busy connecting to DeepSeek as soon as possible, and even large companies have put aside their pride and connected their products to DeepSeek. Small companies without resources want to connect, so they can only find these unreliable third parties. When buyers get the so-called interface, they either find that the interface is completely unusable, or that the interface is stolen or forged, causing huge losses to the buyers.

The army of money-making people is still pouring in, how long will the DeepSeek craze last?

The popularity of DeepSeek not only gave birth to the first batch of pioneers, but also triggered a crazy influx of the subsequent army of money-making. With the continuous exposure of successful cases, more and more people realize that even if they miss the early bonus period, as long as they seize the opportunity, they can still get a share of this wave of AI. From individual entrepreneurs to small and medium-sized business owners, from freelancers to traditional industry practitioners, a "national gold rush" around DeepSeek is sweeping in. In Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and WeChat, DeepSeek entrepreneurial exchange groups are everywhere. A blogger on Xiaohongshu said that the DeepSeek learning group opened 6 groups of 500 people in one day, and the number of groups is still increasing.

"It's been a long time since I studied DeepSeek's money-making methods so seriously. The last time I studied it so seriously was when I was preparing for the college entrance examination." said an entrepreneur. Not only online, but also institutions in cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Wuhan, Xi'an, and Suzhou have established DeepSeek research institutes offline and held entrepreneurial exchange seminars, where industry leaders teach wealth secrets, and every session is packed.

In addition to those who are learning to make money, some people are still preparing or have already put it into practice. Chen Lin, a cross-border e-commerce seller in Guangzhou, said that she originally mainly engaged in clothing exports, but due to language and cultural differences, product descriptions and advertising copywriting were always not accurate enough. A week after the Spring Festival, she began to learn to use DeepSeek to generate multilingual product copywriting and social media promotion content. "In the past, an English product details page required the team to toss for a whole day. Now DeepSeek can generate 10 versions in half an hour, and it can also automatically adapt to the usage habits of different regions in the United States and Europe." Chen Lin said that after using DeepSeek, the store conversion rate increased by 18%. In addition, a third-party service market around DeepSeek is taking shape. Some people have opened up new business channels, specializing in selling prompts (command templates), developing plug-in tools, and even a subscription service for the "AI Application Case Library". This ecology allows latecomers to stand on the shoulders of their predecessors and get started quickly. There are also many people from across industries who come to learn DeepSeek to make money, including short dramas, medical care, games, etc., hoping to obtain the "true scriptures" of making money. Some laymen have even opened stores to make money.

Today, the "gold rush" caused by DeepSeek is still heating up, and more and more people are accumulating in this field full of opportunities. From Brother Whale's point of view, DeepSeek does show the possibility of AI landing, and R1 has also maintained its lead for a period of time. Learning DeepSeek will make you do many things in your work and life more efficient. But you need to identify a lot of content that sells anxiety. There are many free teaching courses on Bilibili itself. Enterprises can implement DeepSeek, and they can also use the API interfaces of major manufacturers such as Volcano Engine, Tencent Cloud, QingCloud, and Baidu Smart Cloud. AI evolves in one day, and humans evolve in three years. In this era of change, catching up and being cut are indeed on the line.

Editor: Yang Xiaohe