The money is split three ways. The platform (website) gets 40 percent, the hostess (most are young women) gets 45 percent and the rest goes to the agency that recruits, trains and manages them. In the hierarchy of this business, the vast majority of hosts take home 5,000-15,000 yuan a month while those at the top can earn up to 1 million.

Longzhu.com made headlines when it signed Han Yiying, a 27-year-old game player with the online handle MISS, for a 20-million-a-year contract.

A chat room can be a room, (many low-end hostesses are put up by their agents in cheap hotels and work much like a telephone service center) but it can also be anywhere.

Ding Yao, who has 480,000 followers, aired her attendance at a comedy show during which she was warned by the theater for infringing on the comedian's copyright. Her highest-rated moment came when she tried on a bevy of newly bought fashion wear from South Korea, attracting 600,000 simultaneous viewers, according to Thepaper.cn.

Late last year, a host on Douyutv.com showed himself driving a luxury car, accidentally causing a traffic accident that injured two people. Another one rented a drone to peep into a college girls' dormitory. One male host on Zhanqi.tv has made a specialty out of eating gross stuff like rats and spiders raw. And a female host supposedly with 600,000 followers aired herself cutting her wrist, instantly drawing 450,000 viewers.

I say "supposedly" because the numbers displayed on the screen can be easily manipulated. The platforms may inflate them－sometimes by 10 times－to make someone look more popular than she actually is.

The same goes for the "bidding" when one party throwing tons of bouquets could be the platform's bait to entice real bidders to throw away real money.

Chinese laws tolerate titillation, but outright sex? That'll incur the wrath of the authorities.

A friend of mine who partners one of the big platforms told me that a hostess can actually make much more money if she is willing to "meet up" with those who bought her virtual rockets or flowers. It has nothing to do with the website, he says, which nominally forbids sex for money.

Admittedly, the websites have employees policing the chat rooms. But how can a staff of a dozen be effective in monitoring all the monkey business going on in hundreds of thousands of rooms?

So they use filter words such as "sex", which spawns countless euphemisms. Their software is able to catch suspicious behavior through the analysis of graphics, they claim. And the red light goes on whenever there's a sudden spike in viewership to one room.

All this reminds me of the dichotomy in China's magazine market. Metropolitan residents would never know this until they go to a bus station in a county-level city where magazine stalls have none of the glossy titles ubiquitous in big cities. Instead most titles are priced below 3 yuan and feature such headlines as "Woman's headless body found floating in local river".

Chat rooms are said to cater to that demographic, which is huge but below the radar.

If belated regulation of other online activities is any guide, there will be a crackdown down the road, and chat room hosts may have to be vetted by government entities rather than agents who pressure them to "accidentally" drop whatever scanty thing they are wearing.