Oh, no, I do get why people would buy into money-making courses. I'm basically wondering why the market for money-making courses isn't a winner-take-all market, with the wealthiest course-creators spending their advertising budgets (that they earned by building their money-making-course empire when the field was more green) to outcompete upstarts in the money-making course market. Presumably, people can only be actively trying the techniques of one of these courses at a time — so why aren't most people focused on learning + putting into practice, the techniques of a few very popular courses?

> so why aren't most people focused on learning + putting into practice, the techniques of a few very popular courses?

Because that entails hard work.

No, I meant, why aren't a few very popular courses the only ones people hear about, such that they're de-facto only focused on those? Money buys advertising / brand recognition; why aren't there big-name money-making-course brands that are outcompeting the new upstarts? Why isn't the market consolidating around the guys who won big first and then reinvested in making their brands the biggest?

Because the techniques don't work, and when people are conned once they are likely to fall for the next con artist selling fundamentally the same thing but with different branding.

A lot of the marketing behind these scams is that they're different than everything you've tried before - the point being is that the number of people who fall for these scams isn't enormous, but they will fall for scams over and over again. Just probably not from the same person selling it.

It's the same as any kind of cult messaging. It's not surprising that the size of a cult designed to exploit people has an upper limit, but it is shocking that the same people will join multiple cults time after time.

But if you know that, then — as a cult leader — why not come up with a scalable approach to founding cults, that all share underlying infrastructure (marketing, accounting, etc) but just use different figure-head cult-leaders, different language, and different outreach techniques; and so form distinct isolated cult communities? Different marques of the same company, in other words — like how every "competing" soap or cereal in the grocery store aisle is still making the same company money in the end.

(I do know at least two real exampless of this meta-approach to scamming: 1. there are meta content-farms, which hire people and train them to run seemingly-independent content-farm YouTube / TikTok / etc channels; and 2. there are serial Kickstarter/IndieGogo scammers, that follow a loop of forming a new shell company, hiring a new actor to pitch a fake idea, steal people's money for it, and disappearing.)

And, while they're at it, why not constantly seek to acquire the pitch+content from smaller, nascent money-making course creators, and run their content through your existing business engine? Why not be the EA of scams?

Being a scammer doesn’t mean you’re a criminal mastermind.

It takes capital, time, and work to become “the EA of scams”, at which point you’re calling further scrutiny on yourself, meaning even more work (and staff, who you’ll have to trust) to not be in hot water with the law.

Scammers, like the people they scam, are mostly after a quick easy buck. You’re posing “why not” questions as if it’s straightforward to accomplish what you’re suggesting. It’s not. It takes effort and risk without a guarantee of success. Most scammers don’t become “the EA of scams” for the same reasons most game companies don’t become EA.