……

That said, I have to agree with Andrew; parrot-book-secrets.com is rather on the rent-seeking side. One of the reasons I started a business is because I didn’t want to be there: I wanted to actually produce something fairly significant.

cjs@cynic.net

You simply picked a bad example. Why’s your example bad?

- This company provides a poorer product and a higher price than something as simple as borrowing book from a library, or making friends with their local pet store bird expert

- This company is run by an experienced SEOer, which most bird book authors (think they) cannot afford. Furthermore, real bird experts won’t stoop to the ethical grey areas that this guy has, because they have reputations to uphold. This guy runs his bird site under scores of different names–to the average internet user, if parrot-book-secrets.com gets a bad review, they won’t figure that my-lovely-parrot-book.com is the same site.

- The majority of the earnings of this company come from rent-seeking activities, not the sort of economic productivity that helps the economy. Let me give you a hyperbolic example: Suppose there were two car makers, MEmotors, and Icringe. Let’s say MEmotors had a billion dollar advertising budget, and you spent nothing since Icringe does not believe in advertising (bunch o’ engineers). Now, everyone’s heard of MEmotors, and no one knows that Icringe exists. So I can charge a monopoly-level price, say twice of my actual costs on the car, because no one knows you exist. People are happy buying MEmotors cars at $100k, because no other cars exists as far as they know! Icringe sells a car for $20k at a small modest profit, but no one knows they exist. The result is that society pays too much for cars and wastes money on dancing television jingles. (This lasts for the short run, until Icringe figures out how to advertise…then in the long run, prices come down, but we’re still all wasting money on advertising). Advertising isn’t our economy’s savior, it’s one of its pitfalls.

There really are very good businesses out there selling online newsletters and ebooks. You simply chose about the worst possible example.

Oh yeah, and the bowling alley at Stanford didn’t become a computer room; the computer room is upstairs in Tresidder. If i recall correctly the bowling alley was next to the Coho, where the current Treehouse and the glass-walled fitness center are. Feel free to email me if you need a pair of eyes to review your posts, Cringely.

If the guy really earns $400,000 per year, then why doesn’t he spend a little of that to build a more polished site? Doesn’t he want to earn even more money? Why doesn’t he use Google Adwords (he can certainly afford it)?

In other words, his current marketing strategy is typical of someone who earns $40,000 per year — the $400,000 figure sounds like baloney to me…

It shows just how someone who is entrepeneurial, methodical and focused can create a business.

Do you think ANYONE you see on television hawking a product gives a rat fuck about the product their hawking? I mean, honestly, you care in the most cynical of ways: are you getting paid enough based on how this could effect your name positively or negatively? That’s the gig.

Who cares if the spokesmodel is real? Who cares if she “actually” gave the “reviews”? The kid cut and pasted some feedback, and created a persona.

I think hearing that a young kid from India is raking in some serious cash for a relatively “simple” idea has peoples’ brains on underload…

Cringely, ignore the trolls. Don’t even waste blog space to explain yourself, re-educate, or change someone elses feeble mind. If they truly understood the message, they would get their pencils pushing and figure out a way to make some of their own money.