|
|||
I had someone give me the Amway pitch once; it was an interesting experience. It was one-on-one, and the complete emphasis was on recruitment. In fact, it was fully 45 minutes into the presentation before I was even told what product was being sold. (Even though this was more than 20 years ago, "Amway" had already become a dirty word, and my hopeful recruiter knew to steer clear of the name until after he'd hooked me. Needless to say, I wasn't hooked.) He emphasized how much money I could make by recruiting my own downline, so that I'd get a share of all the sales they made, and indeed a share of all the sales from the downline they made. Since the system would grow infinitely far, there was no limit to the wealth I could rake in, if only I signed up and became part of my benefactor's downline. It occurred to me today that web logging is a form of multi-level marketing, for some people. The currency is hits, the organizational structure is linking. The structure is a cross-branched tree; with people getting a percentage of the traffic of sites which link to them. The object of the game is to get other people to make permanent links to you. The more important the site which does this, the more valuable the link and the higher you rise in the pyramid. When your site begins to get a lot of traffic, you in turn can bestow largesse on those below you with transient or permanent links, and by so doing begin to build your own downline when they link back to you. The grand prize is to get "A-listers" to link to you; then you get a percentage of the huge traffic their sites get. To do this, you suck up. You create a permanent list of links to A-listers on your own page and hope they notice the refers -- and by so doing you become part of their downline, increasing their power. They might reward you with a link in return, usually transient. Of course, one thing about multi-level marketing (MLM, the charming name for this kind of scam) is that the people who get in early tend to rise the furthest, because they truly do benefit from the expansion of the organization before the market gets saturated. Eventually nearly all the suckers in a given area are recruited, and the new recruitment rate for the organization as a whole slows considerably. And by the same token, there are some web logs which are heavily linked and well known and get a lot of traffic, even though in overt terms they aren't particularly noteworthy judged solely by the content they present. In most cases the reason is simply longevity; nearly invariably such a site has been maintained for a long time. And since them as has, gets, the mere fact that they get a lot of traffic reinforces itself as others below them in the pyramid link to them in hopes of a return link, thus driving more traffic to the A-list site. Other more recent entries feel as if they should get the same attention and wonder why they don't. The reason is that they're the suckers who got into the game late, just like the leaves in the Amway tree who wonder why it is that they can't seem to recruit anyone for their downline. Of course, some Amway leaves play the game a different way: they forget about recruiting and decide to start selling product instead. It's actually possible to make a reasonable amount of pocket money that way, though you can't make a living; Amway's products are not actually all that bad (if, perhaps, a bit overpriced). These are actually the people who keep the organization working (and out of jail); the equivalent for web loggers is the people who forget about |
|||
