Purdue University is practically littered with cylindrical wooden signboards on which people post everything from political protests to student group event notifications. One popular object to tack up to these boards is the “business opportunity:” direct marketing companies, online survey scams, and so forth. The other day I saw a number of business cards tacked to one advertising a way to “SAVE MONEY,” “MAKE MONEY,” and “HAVE A BLAST,” in that order. As an amateur connoisseur of financial scams, I couldn’t just walk on by. I had to pull it off and have a look.
“Are you ready to Blastoff?” the other side inquired, excitement fairly rippling from the laser-printed card stock. It directed me to a URL ending in a member’s name; a network member was attempting to recruit others on behalf of the network. I knew I had some gold on my hands here. What I found digging into Blastoff Network is at once both ridiculous and ridiculously brilliant.
Let’s begin by having a look at the full text of the card itself, after which we’ll look at the Blastoff Network Website. The three enticements I saw from afar turned out to be merely titles for smaller text, the first being:
SAVE MONEY
Receive up to 15% cash back on every online purchase from over 400 popular retailers.
Ooh, thanks to your partnerships with online retailers, I can actually buy things at a reduced price? Sign me up!
MAKE MONEY
Invite your friends & get paid everytime they shop.
Sweet! I can get my bros involved and send an invite to everyone I know on Facebook and MySpace! I’ll be raking in the dough and so will they!
HAVE A BLAST
with your customized homepage featuring the best music, videos, games, news, and more!
Oh, man! They give me my own website for free? And I get to customize it? Why doesn’t anybody else ever do that? That’s totally sweet!
Wait a minute. The “network” has “partnerships” with retailers, through which I ostensibly save money by being a member. I “invite” people, who also invite people, to build a downline through which I earn money every time they buy through Blastoff. And they try to excite me by offering a veneer of individuality as a part of a larger network. That doesn’t sound like Amway/Quixtar at all!
Except, of course, for the fact that it totally does. Blastoff differs from Amway in that there isn’t a massive signup fee (it is ostensibly free, but I’m not going to dig through the signup process to find out whether or not that’s true) and you’re not selling anything. You’re just buying and recruiting. Other than that, it’s essentially a revamped version of the same old MLM tropes.
The money here, like in any good pyramid scheme, flows from the bottom up: as the downline builds, those above make a fraction more cash per transaction with the Blastoff Network founders at the top making the most. The “customized homepage” seems like Amway’s “Own your own business” ploy modified for the internet generation: an attempt to make you, the member, feel like something special for signing up to fill the coffers of those at the top. The whole thing is so obviously targeted to the social networking crowd that it comes off as almost crass; I almost want to call it Scambook, or MyScam, or something lame like that. This is where the ridiculousness comes in.
I mean, just look at their homepage. At the top is a designed-to-death graphicthat screams “Web 2.0! Web 2.0!” It’s got shout-outs to all the modern web fads and touchstones: iTunes, YouTube, Hulu…There’s even a little bubble-blaster flash game image in there. Anyone not savvy enough to see through this ridiculous attempt to repackage the MLM for the MySpace generation almost deserves to be taken.
Let’s go back to the member page advertised on the card I picked up. The top of that page has a photo of a gang of ethnically diverse twentysomethings looking excited while doing jazz hands and wearing lame modern fashion. That girl on the right is wearing 80s boots and a skirt! That guy in the back is wearing a tweed jacket! And look at the chick on the far left, with her sassy giant fucking scarf over her long-sleeved t-shirt.
They’re just like you, other twentysomethings of America, and you can be as happy and as jazz-handsy as they are by joining our awesome network for young people who love money and have never heard of pyramid schemes!
The entire design of the website is worked to make it feel as modern and web-savvy as possible. Almost everything you click takes you to an embedded video that tells you want you want to know, presumably because text is so 2008. Most links manifest as a flash popup rather than a new URL or a standard new window popup. The “customized homepage” is little more than a series of panels where you can place newsfeeds, YouTube videos, free flash games, or uploaded photos; it is, in essence, nothing but a content aggregator that allows users to feel hip and individual, just like everyone else.
Hmm…A customized homepage that can link to my e-mail, or CNN, or YouTube…Where have I seen that before?
There’s a great irony here that lies in the complete unoriginality of the endeavor. They’re marketing the entire thing to the generation of kids who grew up on the web and it’s clearly intended to make the user feel slick and net-savvy, but only the least net-savvy among us will not be able to see through the lameness of Blastoff’s “customized homepage.” It’s old hat. it’s a sad ripoff of similar (and better) services, and it offers nothing new to anyone who’s actually been around the block a time or two.
And, boy, do they play up the social networking angle. No longer are you “recruiting,” you’re “inviting.” Just like Facebook! You like Facebook, right? Gone is the “downline;” instead, you have a “network!” It’s digital, folks! That makes it new and different!
And almost every single sentence on the Blastoff homepage mentions “friends,” “networks,” or both.
Blastoff Network is your launch pad to the internet which can be customized with your favorite news, music, videos, blogs, social networks and shopping, all in one place!
Sweet! Except I thought that my web browser was my launchpad to the internet. Blastoff Network, then, is just a middleman and kind of just gets in the way, actually.
And when you launch your Network by inviting your friends, you’ll really get paid!
Yeah! Invite your friends and make money off of them! Then go dance to Lady Gaga!
When you invite your friends to join the Blastoff Network, you will get paid every time they make a purchase within the Blastoff Network.
You can use that money to buy a new iPod nano or an Xbox Live gold membership or an ironic t-shirt from Threadless.com!
Just think about getting paid every time your friends buy a song on iTunes, books at Barnes & Noble or a new TV at Target.
You’re totally a member of that demographic!
As your friends begin to invite their friends, you will see your network and your income begin to virally grow.
It’s like you’re making money and new friends and it’s all viral like those cool videos! It’s like a marketing meme! LOL!
And lest you doubt my assessment of Blastoff as a crass, faux-social appeal to young 21st century web addicts, let’s visit their “About Us” page. The text at the top almost spells it out explicitly. The social:
If you’re known by the company you keep, then our reputation is stellar because we’re right there with you!
We’re all friends here in our network! The lame web-centric bullshit:
We enjoy the cyberspace phenomenon as much as you do and constantly scour the system to harness the niftiest applications, the hottest music and video, the greatest games, the most up-to-date news, and the best savings on shopping anywhere.
Yeah! You like the web and so do we! Let’s scour the system together! W00t!
Where else can you customize a personal launch pad that lets you have a blast and get paid while doing what you already do?
Any fucking blog service that uses Google AdSense, you stupid fuckers.
Blastoff is an evolving online experience that takes its cues from users like you. So drop us a line, and let us know what would warp your Blastoff experience to the next level.
It’s all about you, you tech-savvy modern consumer, you. Drop us a line and we can leverage our synergy into a strategic, interdependent mass culture paradigm shift!
Under that, we find a bank of cute little caricatures of their staff. Click them, and a Flash popup jumps out at you with their exciting personal information! Let’s look at their founder/CEO:
He doesn’t know the meaning of “quit”, believes that anything can be done, and oh yeah, bleeds ‘blue and silver’. How ’bout them Cowboys?
See, he likes football, and he mentions that in his official company bio! He’s hip and cool and down-to-earth, just like you!
The retarded fake hipness of this nonsense is really starting to get to me, and I think I’ve made my point. The entire market strategy is fucking ridiculous. I also said, however, that it’s ridiculously brilliant. For that, we have to turn to the actual mechanics of the pyramid.
Basically, it goes like this (at least according to Blastoff itself, which may not be the most reliable source): you sign up, which is free, and Blastoff membership allows you to benefit from their “partnerships” with over 400 online merchants (“The Mall”) as well as buy wireless service, cable TV, and travel packages through Blastoff. Each purchase from a vendor will net you between 0% and 15% cash back (or 10%; the details aren’t clear). Purchases of wireless service, cable, and travel won’t get you cash back, but you will get a small fraction of money back when anyone on your downline uses those services. Likewise, when anyone in your downline buys something through the mall, you get a tiny fraction of a percent of the purchase price of their transaction, which, of course, is enticement to recruit even more downline, which, of course, benefits the Cowboys-loving founder because it’s more money in his pocket.
There are, according to Blastoff, no financial obligations whatsoever. Not only is membership free, but, they say, there is no obligation to make a certain number of purchases to maintain membership. You can, it appears, sign up free and never go to the website again without losing your membership.
If you do your legwork, though, and recruit downline, then you’ll make bank out to 20 levels of your “network.” There’s even a graphic illustrating this right here. Inside the shiny, iTunes-style concentric circles we see the kind of bad math and obfuscation for which pyramid schemes are famous. On the left, we see the growth of a network with a recruitment rate of three people per level. It starts with three people, your “first level,” since they’re the three you recruited. The next number is nine, because your first level recruited three apiece. The next is twenty-seven, and so on. The text says:
If you personally sign up 3 people and your Network grows at that same 3x multiple out 10 degrees, you will have over 80,000 in your Network.
That’s huge! Think of all the cash, even if it’s just fractions of a percent apiece! You’ll be rich!
Except not. Remember how you collect from your downline up to twenty levels deep? What they don’t tell you is that, at the twentieth level, you’d have 5,230,176,600 people in your network, i.e. about 75% of the entire population of the planet Earth. And that doesn’t even take into account the fact that you’re not at the first level yourself. The first level is the founders of the company. Assuming that the person whose card you found was at the second level (right under the founders themselves), that puts you at on the third level at the very highest. Going with the same multiple of three just for simplicity’s sake, for you to even have a twentieth level to your network, you’d need 47,071,589,412, i.e. about 7 times more people than currently exist. And that’s only if you’re on the third level and only with a growth factor of three. The other side of the picture plots a starting pool of twenty with a growth factor of three; I don’t think I have to do the math to show you how ridiculous those numbers are.
Oh, what the hell, I will anyway. That model exceeds the population of the planet at level nineteen with 7,748,409,780 people. By the time we get down to you at lowly level twenty-two, your twentieth level will require 2,092,070,000,000 people.
Sounds like a sustainable business model.
When you take into account the fact that most people joining up won’t be anywhere near the top of the pyramid, and that most people won’t be able to maintain a constant rate of network growth, it becomes even more absurd. They also ignore the considerable crossover of acquaintances that friends have; unless you can get someone to sign up who knows a whole hell of a lot of people that you don’t, your network will never get too big because it won’t be able to break its own borders.
So, in summary, their info on “growing your network” leaves out a lot of pertinent information and obfuscates with bad math that doesn’t show how unfeasible the whole thing is. But I said it was ridiculously brilliant because of the design of the pyramid. Right now it sounds like just any old lame pyramid scheme: all smoke and mirrors and consumer fantasies. It doesn’t really become brilliant until you figure out how the founders of the company can maintain their pyramid scheme without direct cash injections from the downline.
That one threw me for a loop. I couldn’t figure out how the model would work unless the downline were required to pay into the company (because it’s not like they’ll actually be able to see shit to people) to keep the money flowing upwards. The answer is sheer genius.
Take a quick look at the “Blastoff Mall.” This is where they link to their “partners,” at which you are a “preferred customer,” which allows you to get your small percent cash back of anything you buy through them. I thought, going in, that I’d find a similar situation to Amway, which partners up with companies like Pepsi to sell Pepsi products to its members. It’s a good deal for Amway; they need it to exist, and it makes them look legit. It’s a good deal for Pepsi, too; Amway members become a captive audience that, as long as they’re members, won’t ever buy a Coke because then they won’t reap the “benefits” of buying stuff through Amway. That kind of model, offered free to members with no monthly purchasing requirements, won’t work, because no money will be flowing. So what’s the deal with Blastoff?
I urge you to click on, oh, say Starbucks, and watch where it takes you.
Does it take you to a special, hip section of the Starbucks website that’s just for ultra-cool cybershopping Blastoff members?
No. It takes you to the Starbucks store’s homepage, same as ever. But the URL is a bit different, now, isn’t it? It’s not “http://www.starbucksstore.com.” No, now it’s “http://www.starbucksstore.com/?CCAID=SBAFFL1&CJID=3120575.” Again, with the relevant part bolded: “http://www.starbucksstore.com/?CCAID=SBAFFL1&CJIDM=3120575.”
AFFL = “Affiliate.” Blastoff Network has not “partnered” with any of these “premium merchants.” They’ve done nothing more than set up an affiliate relationship with them! That’s the same thing that anyone with a website can do through Amazon.com. The Skeptics Dictionary does it. I’m pretty sure Les Jenkins did at some point, too, and he may still. All it means is you toss a link to Amazon on your site, and anyone who follows it and makes a purchase earns you 10-15% of their purchase price as a commission for sending the sale Amazon’s way.
Like I said, literally anyone can do it. Here’s how you do it with Target. It’s easy as pie.
So every time you buy a $100 item at Target.com, Blastoff Network makes ten bucks. They then send two of those bucks to you and keep the other eight. If you have, say, three levels between you and the company itself, they send you two bucks and give each of your upline a nickel apiece, and then they pocket $7.85. Hell, let’s say you’re at the twentieth level from Blastoff itself with eighteen people in your upline between you and them. They still just made $7.10 with no fucking labor because all it took was you buying something.
So of course they can afford to give you a tiny bit of your purchase and all of your downline’s. Each individual purchase nets them far more than they’ll ever have to pay out to you, especially since there are built-in fudge factors; there’s never a flat percentage of cash back for any particular purchase.
This is why it’s fucking brilliant. Blastoff networks never lose money because the percentage of the purchase that they pay out as cash back will never be 100% of its price. They’ve created, with their “Mall,” a hub that links to every retailer with whom they have an affiliate relationship, and they’ve spun the scheme to make the members feel like they’re part of an exclusive group of web-savvy consumers just looking to make a bargain by joining up. Those not-so-web-savvy people then begin routing all of the purchases they would have made anyway (and probably a few more on top) through Blastoff, and Blastoff laughs all the way to the bank.
And all they needed to start it was some server space, some slick web-design, and some crass, thoroughly transparent demographic targeting.
And yet, I’m not entirely sure about Blastoff Network. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t intend to join. I want to be able to tell my kids “No, kids, dad never fell for pyramid scheme. He’s smart like that.” But, at least on paper, Blastoff seems to offer no risk to the individual member. If we take them at their word, there’s no money up front and no continued obligation. Given Blastoff’s ingenious model of affiliate aggregation, there wouldn’t have to be. If you join and simply make your normal purchases through Blastoff instead of without them, you’ll make a few bucks back as they disseminate their affiliate commission. Or you might not. But at least you won’t lose money and time, like you almost certainly would with Amway.
But the key here is that we have no reason to believe we can take them at their word. They might not be discreet with your personal and financial information. There might be hidden obligations in the fine print that only show up once you’ve registered. Like any other scam, they might not be exactly up-front and honest about everything.
And then there’s the big-picture issue. Even if each individual member of Blastoff is at no risk to himself, this kind of large-scale operation serves, like stock market manipulation, to create wealth without creating value. The guys at the top are getting rich off the rubes beneath them, but they didn’t do a damn thing to earn it. They just came up with a rather brilliant model that allows them to sit on their laurels and do nothing while raking in the dough, assuming there are enough morons to bite on a fairly obvious pyramid scheme (there probably are).
And legally, I’m not sure where Blastoff stands. Amway is only legal because they are technically, on paper focused on moving product outside the company. The fact that in practice, they focus far more on recruiting downline is irrelevant. Well, on paper, Blastoff is nothing but recruitment. There’s no actual work going on, no sales, no nothing. You recruit and you buy. This might put them into a bit of a legal pickle, since they have no technical fallback like Amway.
Then again, as an MLM for Generation Y, they represent an entirely new take on the genre. Because their model of an affiliate link-sharing pyramid scheme is so new and different from the traditional “Recruit people but pretend you’re really worried about sales” model of most other MLMs, they might be in a category all their own.
What does everyone else think?
Don
Hilary Mark Nelson
