He seems civil enough, but here’s the thing: He’s apparently a marketing and entrepreneurship coach who sells online courses, but I can’t figure out what he’s actually talking about when he uses the terms ‘launch’ and ‘scaling’.
He says he just did a ‘big launch’ with this guy: https://www.youtube.com/user/AdamIvyTV
Who, surprise surprise, is also a marketing specialist offering advice on social media growth and marketing, and OK, this guy actually seems pretty sincere once you scrape away the clickbaity looking thumbnails.
The whole thing has a more than faint whiff of BS about it - is this just one of those things where there is an amazing money making scheme that you have to pay to find out about (i.e. it is indeed an amazing money making scheme, for the guy who is taking your money)?
Doesn’t seem so much a scam as someone trying to sell you services that you probably don’t really need. He can help “launch” your new content that will “scale” your subscriptions from 500K to 5M.
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, if he’s going to tell me to do anything different from what I’m already doing, I probably don’t want to anyway - it’s a pursuit of enjoyment at least as much as it is of business.
Well the two of them successfully goaded you into giving them more free publicity, so it appears it’s working.
Returns to scale are a big, BIG thing in social-based marketing. Any means, fair or foul, to get your own head above the seething mass of millions of wannanbes is effectively Step 1 on the road to riches, or even a steady small income.
Any chance of a buzzword-free explanation of what they are actually doing here? On the face of it, it all seems to be marketing people marketing their videos about marketing to other marketing people
Are you going to link to your channel or are you keeping your two lives separate? I mean it might sort of lead to an awful lot of nitpicking in your comments.
It’s simply the modern online version of “Being famous for being famous”.
The goal is to get lots of people mentioning their name. If 1 tells 2 who tell 4 who tell 8, then pretty soon somebody who already has multiple hundred thousand people following their channel or feed or whatever will mention them.
If they are then lucky that’ll translate into both more sales for their products, but more importantly it’ll lead to more clicks on the ads on their site and perhaps they can themselves develop a multi-hundred thousand following. At which point they can be paid a lot of money by advertisers for every tweet or post, even the ones about their breakfast.
Monetizing social media is a lot like the music business was in the 1970-90s. For every hot rocker making millions, there are hundreds of thousands of guitar players in bars making bupkiss. The way to riches is popularity, and popularity is entirely a snowball effect; the more popular you are, the easier it is to become yet more popular.
These guys have a small snowball now and are rolling it around as hard as they can to make it bigger. Hoping that growth takes on a life of its own soon.
Yeah, I guess. I find it pretty repellent. I mean, sure, everyone probably wants to be successful in some way, but it’s almost like success has become a goal completely abstracted from excellence (or simply competence) at the task in which success is sought - almost like people think being famous in the field of X will somehow bring about the subsequent state of being good at X, or that success is a discrete ingredient that can be sprinkled over the top of mediocrity to transform it.
Eh, I’m not going to be quite so cynical about it. I haven’t looked at this guy’s content specifically, but there is a need for people like this, and they can certainly help people who might be good at X but aren’t finding success on Youtube.
For example: if you want to have a successful cooking channel, being a good cook is helpful, but doesn’t get you far. You have to connect with your audience and engage them. What video duration works best for that? Then there’s the technical stuff - what video quality is best? What lighting looks good? What should be in my background when I’m talking? And then promotion and SEO (search engine optimization) - how can people find my videos? What titles and tags will make them come up in searches? How do I get people to subscribe, not just watch?
At 500K subscribers, you obviously know what you’re doing with these, but a lot of people can use help. It is a little amusing that a guy with a tenth of your subscribers wants to teach you how to find success.
I don’t disagree with any of that - and I think coaching and mentoring to that end is quite a worthy thing, but the flipside does also exist. I have had numerous people ask me how they could increase subscribers to their channel, because they were desperate for that to happen, and when I visit them, they have literally no content at all; they never made even one video - they want to get big first, and only then is it worth their while to make content for their big audience.
A culture where everyone wants to be a celebrity is a culture devoid of anything except self-promotion. Self-promotion is the baby brother of narcissism, and we can all see how well a society led by a narcissist is doing just now.
Ultimately, this falls at the feet of an advertiser-supported economy. Once advertising is the core product and core driver of an economy, everything goes to hell.
We all know the old saw about jobs and promotions: “It’s not what you know, but who you know that determines who gets hired or promoted”. This simply updates that for scale by substituting “how many” for “who”. It’s still a recipe for producing (and everybody else being forced to consume) shite.
It’s worse than that.
It’s a conscious POV that excellence or mediocrity are simply irrelevant. All that matters is popularity because that’s the sole determinant of payoff. Anything else is pure distraction from the core product: sheer popularity.
I’m borrowing one million dollars from my a dad - a small loan, very small, okay? - and I’m gonna take this very tiny loan from my father, and I’m gonna buy TriPolar out and turn his small online course into a billion dollar enterprise.
I learned this at Wharton. I gotta say I went to Wharton right, otherwise the liberals in the media don’t give you credit. Went to Wharton, Ivy League. My uncle - MIT - engineer, knows nuclear - let me tell you about nuclear. Very brilliant guy. I went to Wharton by the way.