on-line novel? how can that make money??

www.qidian.com is a Chinese on-line reading site under the Shanda Group which owns another two similiar novel website www.jjwxc.net and www.hongxiu.com. Shanda Group owns the copy right of novels which have a total of 40billion Chinese characters, the total daily update of the novels is 50 million Chinese charaters. Shanda Group has 36million registered users and 30% acctually come from foreign countries. Among these three websites, qidian.com is the most successful one, the daily click to the website is 400million times. Many of the book titles became the top search keyword in baidu.com or google.com.cn. The novels are in a wide range , from science fiction to magical fiction, from kongfu novels to history novels, from love stories to war legend. The imagination of the 800,000 contracted writer are unbelievable. Many of the novels have been published by publishers from China mainland to Hongkong and Taiwan. Some are made into mmorpg games and few are being filmed.Here is a summary of some of the novels that have been made into games. http://www.5172game.com/news/yxzx/2009/0811/490.html\
(it is in Chinese). These are two games which were originally novels from qidian.com.
You may wonder how they make money out of it, as the novel text can be easily copied and pased. First they have make the payment very easy. Shanda Group owns several mmorpg in China, to make the payment easy, gamers can easily purchased top-up card from net-cafe or IT related stores which are all over the place. Readers can also use such top-up card to top-up their account and when they log-in to the net, there is atomatic deduction of money. Each chapter is about 50 cents RMB so it is quite cheap, therefore private websites are not very attractive.
In order to improve the quality of the novels, qidian.com has a policy of monthly token. Every paid user is given some tokens every month, and if they feel that the book is good and want to support the author, they can give their token to the book and the author of the top ten books will be rewarded some cash, and the website send good authors to special training class given by the Association of Chinese Writers which is the national professional author board.Some of the very popular novels are published by publishers and Shanda either sold the copyright for some money or publish the novel with its own press.It is similar case for novels which are made into games, as Shanda it owns several mmorpgs and has several large game development teams, it can choose to do it on its own or sell it to other game makers.With the development of 3G technology, qidian.com now has the service for hand phone users and they can pay throuth their mobile service provider, eg China Mobile, and the readers can read the novel on handphone. This allow people to read novels on subway or bus. The recent news said that Shanda has signed contract with iTune to provide Chinese iPhone user with another payment method through iTune, this service may be also available to oversea users.Qidian.com has been awarded many titles such as 2008"annual best literature website",2008 "Forbes China New Media".