Thursday, September 2, 2010

The Marketing Syndicate and the Business Cycle of the Seduction Industry, Part I

Salty Droid recently ran a couple of very interesting posts about a syndicate of Internet marketers. Given the close relationship between “gurus” in the seduction industry and Internet marketers --- it is often said that Internet marketers are the gurus of the seduction marketers ---, those findings are indeed revealing and can be used to draw many parallels. If you have followed the seduction industry for a while, a lot of it will sound eerily familiar to you.

Here is Salty Droid’s take on the Syndicate:
The Syndicate is a cartel at the center of the get rich quick world of Internet Marketing. Each of the members tries to pass himself off as a freewheeling entrepreneur. (…) Each sells a version of this easy freedom in a bottle to seekers … the sadder the seeker … the better. But the dream :: like the cake :: is a lie. Success in “the industry” correlates not with value :: individuality :: or effort … but with proximity to a toxic core whose basic operations constitute a serious felony and moral failing.
In plain language this means that we have Internet marketers A, B, C, …, N who all have their own special products that cater for a certain problem. But the seduction industry does not have people worrying about improving their “click-through rate” but instead minimizing the number of flaky phone numbers, which then gives rise to a 3 DVD set with the title “No Flakes!”, co-created by Vin DiCarlo, one of my long-time favourites. Maybe Vin should start to work out if he gets too many flakes.

Of course this level of specialization only started after the big categories like “routines-based game” and “direct game” were filled, in addition to whatever it is that Real Social Dynamics is advocating. Then there was a focus on “day game” and the online game fraction is getting bigger, too.

If you have been around for a while, you might have noticed that there was always a release to look forward to. Neil Strauss aka. Style released his “Annihilation Method”, Venusian Arts their “Mind of Mystery”, and Mehow had his “Infield Exposed”, which is easily the most bizarre stuff I have ever seen. Then another crop of people turned up. Suddenly PUATraining and “Gambler” were pushing products. By that time people were telling me that if you have signed up for one guy’s newsletter, you suddenly got bombarded by emails in which other products were being pushed as well. This was arguably the phase when cross-promoting (affiliate marketing) got popular.

By that time people seemed to slowly wake up to all the nonsense those companies spout out. Of course, if there is a ton of competition you better differentiate yourself and find your own niche. However, for the amount of money some people charge for a scaminar seminar on “how to pickup strippers” you could directly spend it on the strippers yourself --- and have sex with them until you are getting sick of it.

But back to “The Syndicate” and Salty Droid:
The Syndicate keeps prices high :: and dissent low. The Syndicate all but eliminates marketplace competition. (…) The Syndicate uses tough :: tasteless :: and intimidating tactics to defend against what it sees as threats to its unrightful domain.

The comment about price-fixing was true at least until recently. While Neil Strauss wanted to sell his “Annihilation Method” DVDs for close to $4.000, which is downright obscene, others were a bit more modest and just charged the comparatively modest sum of two grand. Unfortunately for our sad bunch of seduction gurus, the Seduction Market is much smaller than the market the Internet goo-roos want to serve, which presumably includes a lot of wannabe seduction gurus. For this reason you still have the Internet crowd trying to charge two grand for their "products", but the seduction gurus either stopped producing DVDs or lowered the prices drastically. Some people now sell their DVD sets for less than $200, which is still an extremely high figure given production costs. Others such as Real Social Dynamics have stopped releasing “programs” altogether, which is a shame since I was so eagerly looking forward to the stuff that was supposed to be released after the “Blueprint” and “Flawless Natural”. RSD claimed it would “really blow your mind”, but I guess it won’t anymore. Shame on all those "piratefags".

To be continued...

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