The basic concept of paid to read (which I will now call ptr because otherwise I'll get sick of typing it), is that advertisers pay the site X amount of money, to make sure that their advert reaches X number of people. Instead of spamming the world with them, ptr sites find people willing to read the ads, or visit the sites, in return for either points or money.
What this entails:- Each day you will be sent a number of mails by the site, which will contain a link. You click on the link which will open a page with a timer on (anything ranging from 5 seconds to 180 seconds), when that timer has expired, you earn the amount allocated to the link.
You can only have one open at a time, so if you get 20 mails, all at 180 seconds, you'll be bored stiff for a bit (except on the rare occurances where they send you to an interesting site). BUT you get paid to basically open your email.
It does take a while to build your earnings up, you won't become a millionaire overnight. In fact I'm a member of all of these, and when I was doing them obsessively for just under a week, I still didn't even manage to hit $1 on any one individual site. They estimate it will take about 3 weeks normally to reach payout level.
There ARE ways however that you can increase this speed.
1) Downlines: For each person you recruit to the site there are advantages. Some sites will pay you a certain amount for every referral (person you get to sign up), some will give you a percentage of their earnings each mail, some even do both. It's not entirely impossible to achieve huge downlines if you promote it to your friends etc.
2) You can upgrade your account: Many of the sites offer bonuses for paying them a small amount of cash to upgrade your account, whether that be a lower payout level, higher earning emails, better referral/downline amounts etc.
3) Other schemes on their site: Many of the paid to read sites also have a "paid to click" (ptc) section, where you click a banner on their site to the same effect as opening a link from your email. Some offer a "autosurf" function, where they show you a number of other websites whilst you earn credits or cash for watching. Some have small games on them (like higher or lower, heads or tails etc) where you can gamble some of your earnings in the hope of winning more. Some have "paid to sign up" schemes where they bring you offers (that generally require you to pay out a little to another company) which they will pay you to sign up. Some have paid to promote (ptp) where if you show others a particular page you earn credit/money. I'll be going into PTP on another page though.
Be warned, whilst if you sign up for all of these you will overall earn more money, please bear in mind that some send 20 or more emails every day, if you sign up for them all your inbox WILL explode horribly. Trust me on this, I'm speaking from experience.
Also, before you try to be cunning, and get a bot to do it all for you, they have turing numbers, meaning a bot won't work, and they also send out random "cheat link" which if you follow either close your account or deplete your earnings. Just thought I'd save you the time of trying it.