Monetization of the Manosphere

illimitableMan

Note: this was written in 2017, just as the 21 convention got started and people saw there was actual money in the red pill. As with everything, it’s aged … and I’ll leave it to you to tell if it aged well.

This is something of a disgruntled critique and will likely raise a few heads, cause some figures in the sphere to dislike me on a personal level, and possibly even stir up controversy. Nonetheless, I’d like to stick my neck out and state some things that bother me about the general direction the manosphere has been taking.

I suspect that, being one of the oldest red pill posters as well as a known blogger, these concerns are more likely to be heeded, noted, and seriously discussed as a community coming from me than they would be if expressed by a less established member. Likewise, as someone who has retained anonymity, has not attended 21Con, and has not become part of the larger get-along gang of “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine,” I have the political and economic impartiality to say things about our space that perhaps others do not.

Basically, I don’t mind being hated for telling the truth because doing so won’t harm any significant personal or economic relationships I have.

I haven’t published anything on my website for roughly a year and a half now, taking an extended hiatus from writing and “building my brand” (I use that term loosely, because even though it’s the byproduct of my mind, it’s not a personal brand). And in that time, the sphere has changed a lot, and as far as I can tell, it’s being diluted and seized upon by people looking to hijack the community we’ve built to push their own personal brands and line their pockets, rather than add to the literature or provide a fair value exchange.

Essentially, we’re under siege from grinders, grifters, hustlers, marketers, and other opportunists who see us as an undersaturated market they can tap into and sell to. These types leverage the social network we’ve built, forums and blogs that gradually migrated to social platforms like Twitter as writers such as myself and Rollo began using it more, and are inserting themselves into that network to rinse the fuck out of the less intelligent amongst us with trite platitudes and rephrased, stolen content for personal profit.

Sure, we’ve always had people selling e-books or the occasional PUA course, but for the most part, our space has remained relatively non-commercialized. It’s been more about supporting individual content creators who push the envelope, via book purchases, donations, or even merch (see: Roosh), rather than trying to dilute the core message by corporatizing it.

PUA was always more corporatized and bullshitty than TRP, with $5K-per-weekend bootcamps and the like, but the red pill itself has historically been an organic community where the bulk of value was provided for free, and the rest was offered at a modest price in a fair exchange between creator and consumer.

At the end of the day, nobody needs to buy Rollo Tomassi’s books if they don’t want to because everything in them is already on his blog. His monetization is respectful rather than manipulative. This is an ethical form of monetization, it allows people to support work they’ve already enjoyed for free if they choose, and it’s content-heavy rather than marketing-heavy.

That’s a fair value exchange: years of thinking and writing for a modest price in something tangible.

Selling a “mindset” course or a “how to make money online” product for $293 a unit, “whilst stock lasts” and “for a limited time only”, while using aggressive copywriting is not. That’s insulting people’s intelligence and, in all likelihood, selling a subpar product that doesn’t live up to the grandiose claims it makes, for a quick buck.

I now see that even 21 Convention is marketing soap claiming it will “turn you into an alpha chad due to an infusion of pheromones.” Beyond the immediate comedic value... is this serious? We’re selling soap now? Seriously? The manosphere is selling soap?

I honestly hope I’m missing the joke here, because at face value, it looks like a cheap cash grab. This isn’t even meant as a shot at 21Con, since it’s clearly helped a lot of manosphere writers and personalities network in the real world. It’s mostly an information aggregation service delivered in a live speaking format.

But when we start selling soap with claims it’ll help you get girls, there’s a level of corporatization and opportunism that I believe is ultimately harmful. Let’s face it, there is no fucking soap on this earth that’s gonna get you laid. And anyone who buys that crap believing it will is a gullible idiot.

Whether it’s soap or overpriced marketing courses, the goal is clearly the seller’s enrichment, not the transmission of useful information that uplifts men or combats the toxic effects of two generations of divorce and single motherhood brought on by feminism, which is, after all, why this community exists in the first place. Or has greed made us forget?

All of this is most visible on Twitter, with the endless stream of marketers, narcissistic attention-seekers, and personal branders who’ve popped up out of nowhere. They’ve gained a foothold in our social network by being a mix of theatrical and consistent, posting rephrased general self-improvement advice, while having zero interest or ability to contribute anything original to the literature we’ve built.

Many of them steal ideas, rephrase them, claim them as original, and profit off knowledge that was freely given, repackaging it into a paid product. Some of them owe their entire platform to the red pill, but publicly disavow or outright deny any association with it.

I remember Twitter as far back as 2013, back before the rise of personal branders, marketers, and other parasites who now flood the feed telling you to sign up for their newsletter or promising to help you “make thousands per month,” while others, who couldn’t write a remotely profound long-form essay to save their lives, push the same tired bullet-point checklists of generic self-improvement advice over and over again.

These people then have the gall to tell their critics, “You don’t like money,” or “Stop hating on people trying to make a living,” when you call them out, which I have, primarily because I’m an asshole, and secondarily because I’m protective of a community I played a large hand in building... one that I now see being opportunistically exploited.

The truth? I’ve made a decent sum of money from the manosphere, all without selling my integrity or treating my followers like idiots by peddling garbage with manipulative marketing.

If I wanted to read Ca$hvertising, launch a supplement, sell a course, partner with affiliates, and slap banners on my blog, it’s well within my power. I don’t do it, because these are consumer-unfriendly practices that dilute my content.

Does that mean I don’t make as much money as I could by not manipulating people at every available opportunity? Yes. But it also means my brand is stronger and more trustworthy precisely because I don’t resort to those gimmicks.

I’ve never bothered to launch or sell a product (much to the annoyance of many who still pester me to write a book, yes, I’ll do it eventually, before you ask). Instead, I’ve made money by giving people the option to support my work if they see fit. This has mainly come through donations, Patreon, and consulting, not through affiliates, ads, courses, supplements, or subpar products.

I’m happy with that form of monetization because it lets me create the content I want to create, putting quality first, rather than chasing money and letting quality become an afterthought.

I respect my followers. I want them to feel enticed to support good work, not to feel like a flock to be fleeced at every opportunity.

And the poetic irony here, of course, is that I’m one of the few in this space most associated with exploring cunning and the dark triad, yet, when it comes down to it, I’m one of the few showing the most integrity in not exploiting my fans for cash.

I’ll leave you with this final thought:

There’s nothing wrong with making money. But there’s an honourable way to do it, and a scummy way.

As a community, we need to stay vigilant in maintaining a kind of organic resilience against those who would exploit the social network we’ve built for quick profits, yet who don’t give a remote flying shit about men. They’re here to build their wallets, not build men.

When you see it, call it out. Force people to make money ethically, by providing high value in return, or deprive them of your cash altogether.

Because if we allow the increasing corporatization of this community to continue, that’s what will ultimately kill it. And we can’t afford for that to happen.

Comments

azeenab1

"Quality first" vs "money first" is a false dichotomy. "Donations and consultations are OK. Books and online courses are NOT OK" is arbitrary. There is nothing noble about being a hobby blogger who doesn't charge for his work.

No one is holding a gun to people's head asking them to buy products. Everything you need to help yourself is available online for free. So you need to ask yourself:

Why have most people still not taken action?

Why do they pay for information they can get for free?

Eventually, you'll come to the realization that money is a byproduct of the value you create in the world. The more money you make, the more value you can create and the more impact you can have in the world. In fact, by not charging for your work and limiting yourself to begging for donations and trading money for your time...

You're being selfish.

You could help many more people. You choose not to. Maybe you can't be arsed because it takes too much time to produce quality. (Imagine how much more time you'd have to create content if you didn't need to work a job to pay the bills.) Maybe you think yourself some sort of martyr, above it all.

But if we're talking about impact and lives changed, who has helped more men? You or Mike Cernovich? You or Roosh? Hell, don't even count book and audiobook sales. Just count the website traffic.

How are they able to reach so many?

By charging for their work.

red_philosopher

There's money to be made with things that work. Ethical business would suggest that helping people, for a price, comes with the commensurate duty to not commit copyright infringement. While original content can only go so far, people like gaylubeoil are at least taking steps in order to spread the RP mentality to those who seek it.

Here, we have walls and walls and walls of text. Some cannot easily or effectively process or put into practice the teaching here. It is difficult to codify, difficult to understand, and difficult to fully comprehend due to it's diffuseness. This creates opportunity. There's very little humanity about it as well The darkness of social media limiting the scope of the message day in and day out. Sometimes, a human face is all that is needed in order to deliver a clear, actionable message.

I've had some success one-on-one delivering a RP message, the need is there.

Anonymous

In the subreddit people are endorsed for a reason. On Twitter everyone can claim to be Red Pill, all he has to do is put "Alpha/cad/Red/whatever" in his name and bio. If you want to start exposing frauds for what they are then make a list with TRP Red endorsed twitterers/ scammers/blue pillers that claim to have smth to contribute and let the manosphere wars begin once again.

When Artful and Stedman started their bullshit upstream twitter this opened the doors for more crap like them - "Rollo doesn't want ppl to discuss things whaaaa" "Rollo calls me purple pill because I shove blue pills into little kids assholes whaaa"

Guess what - it worked and now there are thousands of retards regurgitating their words.

If you want the red pill to have a secure footing on Twitter there actually have to be Red Pill writers on twitter. So far all there is is Rollo, Rian, and GLO. You said it yourself - you haven't put out anything in a year, victory has defeated you if you don't want to lead your red pillers to red pill valhalla someone else will take your place, and that someone might be a 60kg never touched a barbel in his life Tap Soymen.

You're the Dark Triad Expert, dealing with some wimps on twitter shouldn't be a problem for you.

Auvergnat

It’s quite ironic to see the Manosphere’s Master of Machiavelianism complaining about the perceived lack of morals in the tactics of some people.

If a personal profit can be made, there will be people going after it, even if it comes at the detriment of the community (here, low-value washing). This is how humans roll, and redpill-aware people, who have learned to identify and acknowledge the dark side of human nature, should really know that by now.

This is exactly what happened to the pick-up community. Before the expensive bootcamps and books/dvds for sale, it was simply an internet community sharing tips for free. Then some realised the money that could be made. At start, it was only the established gurus with true knowledge and the price was probably about right, then everybody jimped on the bandwagon, including many low-quality / scam. Every human endeavour follows that process. If anything, I am surprised at how slow it’s taking the redpill community to monetise. My take is to let the Market be. Good value-for money offers will thrive. Bad ones will quickly whither, though like weeds, they grow back faster that you can uproot them.

All in all, I think you have the right to complain, but why bother? It’s like a TRP newbie complaining about Hypergamy.