Gnats and Fruit Flies buzz around your head. You swipe at them, but they persist. They are annoyances that can drive you to distraction. They have no real value in the scheme of things. They are simply pesky little undesirable critters.
For just about any non-traditional business model such as Affiliate Marketing, you can typically find a Google-ranked reference to such businesses as being a scam, a pyramid, or a cash gifting "scheme". These "gnat" articles are sleazy and self-serving due to nearly 100% of the time their sole purpose is to trash the company cited and then tell you how great their opportunity is as an alternative.
It should go without saying that this is duplicitous and disingenuous, not to mention that most of these posts are written at about an eighth-grade level.
Then, there is the issue of "what to do about it". It is not like any of these people offering their opinions have integrity. Otherwise, they would not engage in this form of bait-and-switch marketing in the first place. As well, these people are obviously desperate to have to resort to this type of marketing. As such, there is really nothing to "go after" legally in terms of bringing a suit for slander. It is simply not worth the time, energy, and expense to go after these sleazeballs.
As such, just like Gnats and Fruit Flies, we learn to live with them - annoying as they are - and being a huge disservice to the Social Commerce industry.
However, before I close let me simply say this. If a transaction exists between two people and an override or administration fee is paid to a company for use of their platform, it is legal. The fact that different packages exist at different prices points is irrelevant as long as a transaction takes place for something of value. In our industry, this thing of value is typically a digital, eLearning product. Again, the perceived value of these products is irrelevant - a point on which many of the gnats want to harp.
If anyone wants to argue the point of value, you would need to explain to me how joining Mar-a-Logo is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars as an initiation fee, and then $14K a year. This is a matter of scale at any Country Club. So let me ask, are Country Clubs widely known as scams? Yes, you are paying for the pool, the tennis courts, the golf course, the clubhouse where you can throw a party. But is it a scam because people choose to belong? The answer is pretty obvious.
We sell access to digital information in a peer-to-peer business model. It is no less legitimate than any act of commerce no matter what the gnats and fruit flies have to say about it.
