All perfect praise be to Allah the Lord of the Worlds. May His peace and blessings be upon Prophet Mohammad and upon all his family and companions.
After reviewing the details of the mentioned program, it became clear that the company’s work involves two areas: one related to browsing advertisements and giving “likes,” and another related to network marketing.
As for the first area:
The idea of "ad-browsing and opinion polls" websites is to provide marketing services and advertise for commercial companies, or conduct surveys for research centers and relevant institutions, through an online advertising platform or news ticker. To ensure that these advertisements are viewed by as many people as possible, the site administrators pay their viewers and subscribers a certain amount of money for watching the ads, participating in surveys, and for every other viewer who joins through the original subscriber.
From a Fiqh perspective, this contract between the advertising agency and the subscribers is considered a Ju‘ālah (reward-based contract), where the company sets a specific payment for each ad or survey completed by the “worker” and for each viewer he brings in. In principle, this is permissible, provided the following conditions are met:
1. Free subscription — One should not have to pay in order to browse ads or participate in surveys, nor to receive a product that serves as a cover for paying the subscription.
2. Known and guaranteed payment — If the payment is uncertain, such as saying: "Fill out the survey and do your best, but you will only be entered into a prize draw," this is Gharar (uncertainty) which renders the transaction impermissible.
3. No payment to increase commission rates — The subscriber must avoid paying any money to increase his commission or improve his membership benefits, whether from his earnings or via bank transfer. These precautions are to avoid falling into Maysir (gambling) or Riba (usury), as many schemes disguise impermissible “money-for-money” transactions by adding an unnecessary product or service.
4. Avoid prohibited ads — The subscriber must avoid viewing ads or surveys promoting unlawful products such as tobacco, alcohol, and similar, or any images/scenes prohibited in Islam.
5. No fraud or deception — One must avoid doing fake likes or views to artificially inflate engagement numbers, as this is cheating and misrepresentation.
As for the second area:
The part involving network (multi-level) marketing is Harām. This method, as widely practiced today, is not legitimate Islamic brokerage in most of its forms, but rather a type of gambling and Maysir. Participants usually join solely to earn rewards for bringing in other customers. If they manage to recruit a certain number of people and fulfill the company’s conditions, they earn commissions which may be greater or less than the initial payment they made; if they fail, they lose their payment entirely. This uncertainty puts the transaction into the realm of Gharar and Maysir.
The key cause of prohibition is the requirement to pay money upfront, whether as a subscription or to buy an undesired product, in either network or pyramid schemes. Including a product does not make it permissible, because the true aim is the monetary gain, not the product — proven by the fact that participants are mainly after the commissions from recruits, which may far exceed the product’s value. In legitimate brokerage, the broker sells goods to those who genuinely want them; in network marketing, the participant sells to another seller, and that seller sells to another, and so on.
Even if an individual genuinely wants the product, the company’s overall system is not based on trading goods, but on recruiting as many members as possible and enticing those at the top with rewards — at the expense of the large majority at the bottom who get nothing. This creates a small group of gainers and a majority of losers, which is inherently unjust and corrupt.
Many Sharia committees and specialized researchers have previously studied such transactions and highlighted their numerous Sharia risks and violations.
We also note that network and pyramid-marketing companies have developed various methods and approaches, but given that they include the above prohibitions, their ruling remains prohibition.
In conclusion, it is Harām (forbidden) to subscribe to apps or websites that involve any of the above prohibitions. And Allah, The Exalted, Knows Best.
