Network marketing is a nice idea. Actually my friends and other residents in our province has known bitcoin through this networking using bitcoins as payment. If not because of this networking schemes bitcoin could not spread in my country very fast. If there will be more networking companies that will use bitcoin as mode of payment then surely bitcoin will be known worldwide.
I agree with you. I have worked for one of the network marketing companies in the past. After 5 years of the company entrance in my country, nearly everyone knows the company and knows something about that company. The use of bitcoin at the networking schemes is a good way for the profit and also for the awareness. Especially technology companies can do that easily.
I had to think long and hard about whether to use Network marketing in my Bitcoin-only ad network. Your posts bring up the "danger" flag of MLM which is what happens when "nearly everyone knows the company and knows something about that company.". I call that the market saturation point and the ones that get hurt are those that BUY into it at the end. And it was for that reason that I made my network marketing opportunity FREE. So when people start saying I'm out to steal because I use MLM I start to get just a bit pissed at the dumb asses.
The typical "pitch" of a MLM is that you need to pay or buy in because you are buying a business opportunity. While that is true, there is no guarantee of territory or limits on how many competitors there will be within your territory so there is absolutely no way to appraise the value of the opportunity. To those that buy at the peak, they overpaid as there is zero value for the so-called business opportunity because the market is saturated.
Looking at the buyin cost from a different angle will also tell how close the company is to being an illegal pyramid. If everyone in the company only makes their money by recruiting and getting people to "buy-in" then it is absolutely, positively a Ponzi scheme and an illegal (in the US) pyramid.
If, on the other hand, the MLM opportunity has no buy in free and is truly just an opportunity, and those that participate make 100% of their income only from sales (only if and/or when sales occur) then that is as far away from a pyramid as can possibly be set up.
If these dumbasses who spew "MLM" and "pyramid" and "Ponzi" in the same breath would only take a few minutes to actually study and investigate they might not open their foolish mouths so quickly.
Lastly, any company that wants or needs to grow quickly needs to plan some type of "customer acquisition cost". Another way to say that in the sales area is "recruitment" cost. If you don't pay your sales staff to recruit others they won't. If you pay them too much they will recruit too much as well (and saturate the market with starving salespeople). Of all people, Bitcoin people should understand using incentives to get proper behavior and to reward it.
The proper behavior, (in my mind), is to reward both the sales person and the recruiter but without using a "per-head" price. The correct payment trigger is quite obvious ... you pay the recruiter based upon the sales of the recruit. With that arrangement, MLM is MORE fair than any compensation system I have ever seen. It's better than employer/employee and many independent contractor ones.
It's easier to break eggs than to put them together so those that just want to bash MLM ought to start offering something better!
