The Story Behind the Slacker Calendar
Anyone who’s ever scrolled through a WeChat work group just to kill time has probably heard of or seen the “Slacking Off Calendar.” Yup, I spotted a share of it in a group chat today.
It all started as a casual side interest. The creator already had solid design skills, so they whipped up the calendar in their free time without much thought. To their surprise, it went viral—lots of forwarding, and plenty of people privately asking whether they could monetize it. They brushed it off at first, saying it was just for fun and not really a viable income stream. But since they didn’t have a better project on hand, they stuck with it, launched a WeChat public account to aggregate traffic, and kept going.
According to rumors, the person behind the “Slacking Off Calendar” public account gains hundreds of new followers each day. Their steady readership now hovers around 2,000 per post, and with three articles published daily, that adds up to roughly 6,000 total reads a day. Based on Tencent Ads revenue, that translates to about 30–60 RMB daily, or roughly 1,800 RMB a month on the high end, and closer to 800 RMB if you’re playing it conservative. Beyond ad revenue, they likely have some brand deals mixed in, so total earnings are definitely higher than those figures alone suggest—they’ve also got a few side projects running. (Estimated follower count: 40,000, with a ~5% open rate.) I did a quick check, and as of now, cumulative income sits at over 8,000 RMB, which tracks closely with the numbers above.
After nine months (started back in September 2021), the real standout is how ridiculously cheap it is to produce content—rumor has it each post takes just five minutes.
Same goes for the Ocean Calendar and the QR-code trivia gimmicks—traffic’s probably just as strong there.