Is Meta the new MLM?

Pay to get paid? Or never get paid? Location and time freedom?

I’ve fallen into the clutches of three MLMs at this point, and now passionately and vehemently run in the opposite direction of any “Hey girl, I was just thinking of you” messages. Thinking back on how many of those messages I sent, I want to crawl under a rock and die. The fact of digital messages living forever is that I am painfully reminded each time I go to send a message to someone on Facebook, because my last message to them was about an MLM. My backspace button has become a star character.

Ironically, or not ironically, most of those messages start with a follow or a friend request on Facebook or instagram, liking a few photos, a few more comments, and then the first message comes.

But is META the new MLM itself?

I miss the good ole days of Facebook, back in 2011, when I launched my children’s entertainment company, Castle On A Cloud Entertainment. Within two years, we had 100 reviews on our FB page, 2000 likes, and active engagement on all of our posts. If we posted about an upcoming event, it was shared, commented on, liked, and sold out weeks before the event. Now, if I put up a post, I am lucky if anyone sees it.

When I finally joined Instagram my sophomore year of university, I loved that it felt like a scrapbook of amazing milestones of my life, my feed filled with aesthetically pleasing photos, and how easy it was to message friends without overloading my phone book. Facebook was a way to stay in touch with my family and friends, and post a life update, when I went away to boarding school, to college, and touring around the world.

After getting hired by Disney, I sold my company. It was fun to watch the posts, updates each weekend of all the birthday parties and events with photos, and the hundreds of likes and comments on each one. It warmed my heart each time I would see another review, saying how magical the parent’s child’s day was meeting their favorite character.

In 2020, I stepped back into consulting for the company (lol) and in 2022, I took back over the company. Each time I would post on Facebook, it felt like almost no one saw the post. The likes and comments were sparse, if any, so like any business owner or consultant, I started researching why that might be the case. “You have to post and make a lot of content that people want to comment on to get your engagement back up,” said the social media guru’s. “Do a contest where people have to share and comment and tag a post!” “Run Facebook ads!”

Normally, I would not have put this much effort into reinvigorating a Facebook or Instagram, if it had not been such an essential part of our earlier business, but what I failed to realize, is that social media was continually changing their algorithms and they had changed significantly since I had last actively used Facebook pages. For an upcoming event, I tried running an ad, and I have never received ruder and more unkind comments from random people on Facebook than on that ad.

Yes, people typically fight on political posts, but I had never seen that ugly side of users on a post for a princess tea party. That was the day I finally finished setting up my email list with every customer we had ever interacted with. If dealing with trolls and bots and spammer on social media was the only way to get engagement, I wanted off this merry-go-round.

In the last four years, the algorithms continually change, and it feels all but impossible to keep up on whatever the next thing is to crack through. The social media channels all baited us with a free place to “put our stuff” and “put out business” and talk with people, and all the “free advertising". But is anything truly free? The older I get, the more I realize time is the most precious resource we have, and social media and “content creating” sucks endless hours of it that could be better spent in other places.

Most “influencers” suggest that in order for people to see your content, you need to be posting 1-2x per day on IG, with 7-8 stories per day, and 2-3 reels per week. For some decent posts and stories, that’s probably at least 1-2 hours of your day, which is at least 7-14 hours per week. If you account that the average person works 46 years of their life, that works out to 16,100-32,200 hours of their life (assuming you work 50 weeks a year and take 2 weeks off) making all this “free” content. I don’t know about you, but there is a laundry list of things I would rather fill that many hours with than posting on social media and creating quick content.

I remember when I was roped into my first MLM (and ok yes, I totally agree that many companies are pyramids and the CEOs and Shareholders make boatloads more than the bottom paid people LIKE an MLM and we really need to have a law in place like Japan that the highest paid position cannot make more than 8x more the lowest paid position) but MLMs thrive on this concept that if you put a lot of work in up-front, you will have passive income when you reach a certain point of success and have enough people under you. You do your time, others do their time = everybody wins! Location freedom and time freedom, boss babe! (Barf)

Easy enough right?

Not so much.

For a few months, I would go on every single call about “bettering my mindset” and “the system works so it’s you that’s the problem if it’s not working”. I would go down my list of Facebook and Instagram friends and reach out to as many as I could. I would send DMs everyday, share posts about how much “better” my life was and this “new found financial freedom I was discovering”, and participate in collaboration calls and lives, all to chase this promise that I could possibly become financially free, make others financially free, and then everyone would live happily ever after.

The other dirty secret of MLMs, and why so many women with kids (I don’t have the kids part but I somehow ended up there when I felt alone) is that moms tend to feel isolated and alone at home and they are craving community. MLMs quickly give you that community that you crave, even if it comes at the cost of thousands of dollars.

In the last few months, I finally bit the bullet and tried some Facebook ads again on some upcoming events that we need to sell tickets for. I spent $1000 on Facebook ads over the course of two months for some upcoming events, and not a single ticket purchases came from those ads. Of course, every Facebook advertising course will either tell you “you are doing it wrong then” or “you just have to be willing to lose some money while Facebook figures it out,” like every small business has wads of cash lying around that they were hoping to flush down a toilet.

In a recent article, I read that the sweet spot is to consistently spend $350/month on your ads for the algorithms to figure out your target audience and stay prioritized. Akin to the past, I don’t believe there is a formula, or if there is, it does not last long before something else changes.

If now, the sweet spot is to spend $350 a month, what happens when every business or creator starts spending $350 a month? Will the new threshold be higher? What happens if all the people on Instagram and Facebook (and TikTok) get tired of ads and quit altogether? In Europe, you can pay a subscription to opt out of ads.

Unlike Sabrina Carpenter, most influencers can probably relate to desperation. Despite their carefully curated feeds that highlight lavish lifestyles, most of them aren’t making much money, the Wall Street Journal reports. There are ~50 million people making cash off social media posts, Goldman Sachs found last year, but according to marketing agency NeoReach, 48% of them made $15,000 or less. And just 13% raked in $100,000+. The numbers look better if you put a different filter on, though: Emarketer predicts that as a group, social media creators will make $13.7 billion this year, with 59% coming from brand sponsorships. - Morning Brew

Why do so many influencers want to be influencers besides “financial freedom”? Many want the audience and community that comes along with it, and so we just keep thinking, “the next post could be it”, “the next reel could be it”, and we learn each and every little algorithm change to try to beat it at its own game, but we never will. We are not the puppet master, but simply the puppet dragged along, following every move.

“It depends a lot on the product and the audience, but from my experience, you are never going to get results with your first $500 or $1000 on Facebook Ads, regardless your background. It takes a lot of trial and error just to understand what works, and then some more to drill down, get better, lower costs, etc.” -Reddit

In another Reddit thread, where a user asked if many others were experience significantly less income, and the cost of clicks becoming much higher, hundreds poured into posts their current experience with Facebook ads seemingly taking a turn for the worse. Many expressed it feeling meaningless or worthless at this point, and it must be bots, or Facebook changing the algorithm again, or the amount of money Temu spends on ads monthly to take up as much space on the platform as it does.

While big businesses can afford to spend and waste finances figuring out new ads and algorithms, and have entire teams or departments dedicated to this, what about the small business owner or influencer that is a one-man band or small team?

It was announced recently that record labels are investing into AI music to make money, and Spotify has been accused on multiple occasions of making AI music and putting that on its playlists so that it no longer has to pay human artist on the platforms. (The next week, it was announced they are also collectively suing the companies making AI music from their music).

This brings us to the next problem, and the one that will probably ultimately destroy the “influencer” industry, and that is AI influencers.

AI can create in seconds what it takes us hours and days and weeks to create. It can create a brand (watered-down as it may be), analyze all of the data out there, and churn out more content according to peoples’ “preferences” far faster than a human can. What if AI influencers become the next priority in the algorithm and META capitalizes on making their own AI influencers, so that like Spotify, they do not have to pay as much out to creatives?

The lie is starting to feel the same as an MLM I have been sold. If I just work hard enough and spend enough money to META, eventually it will pay off and I won’t have to work because everyone who needs to see my ad will see it and then purchase! (Never mind that I still have to deliver the product/service.) How do I know humans are seeing my ads and not bots? How do I know my ad is being shown or not? How can I trust META’s analytics when they continue to move the line and change the algorithm without a meeting to inform us all? Why is there an entire business of “social media experts” to figure out and teach us when an algorithm changes? Why should I PAY so that my friends (Facebook) and followers (Instagram) even see my posts when they chose to be friends/follow in the first place?

Audrey Helps Actors released a podcast during the strikes with the host of “Living the Dream”, a podcast that dives deep into the origins, dangers and pitfalls of MLMs, pyramid schemes, life coaching MLMs, and more. In the podcast, Jane Marie explains that in an MLM, “There is no one outside of the organization buying it.”

By that definition, no, META is not an MLM, because there ARE people outside of META that are buying ads to promote their businesses. They still have a business outside of META. Fore each person running Facebook ads, there are now hundreds coaches preying on businesses that need or want to run ads by selling them courses, coaching, and methods to “master the algorithm” and “break through the noise.” Within the world of advertising, there is an MLM forming similar to how some perceive life-coaching” in that it becomes its own world of an MLM.

The biggest reason why META and other social media platforms feel like MLMs/pyramids is that you have to get in “on the ground floor” to have a chance to succeed. Whether it is YouTube, Tiktok, META, or now some say even Substack, the key is to grow a following or adopt a method early, to build an audience most effectively when there is less noise and saturation of the platform. If you wait until everyone has joined a platform, you are too late. I do ask myself sometimes how people could afford to subscribe to all of their favorite creators at $5-10 a month? It only takes a few to end up with a cable bill monthly.

The Senior Sales Director, Executive President, Elite Executive National Sales Director, Millionaire team, Crown Ambassador, Super Diamond Star, Royalty Crown Star Emerald, and Beach Body Sexy Babe x20. I might have exaggerated the last two but the rest are real titles! They start to sound like dance competition award rankings after a while. Anyone remember Top 1st or Ultimate Victory, or Sophisticated Platinum (because just Platinum wasn’t high enough?).

Infinite growth in an MLM is based on the fantasy that there is always another customer to sell to. And as was proven in the origin of pyramid schemes, where people “bought in” for $1000-7000 cash, they crumbled when there was no one left to “buy in to the system”. If you get in early with an MLM, you have the most opportunity to grow lines and levels of people below you, but the further down the rank you are, the more unlikely it is that you will grow more layers of people below you, and the harder sell you will have to make to them. “There is no limit” is always the language used alongside “it all depends on how hard you work.” If you convince 5 people in your circle, to convince 5 people in their circle and so on, that is all you need! Except eventually, that argument will no longer work when you run out of people. The later you come into a system, the harder it is to even find people who haven’t been approached to be sold the MLM in the first place. How many people have tried to sell you Beach Body and Arbonne in one year?

In the same way that you might vow to knock the next person that tries to sell you Arbonne in your DMs on META or in the grocery line check-out at Trader Joe’s (true story in Chelsea), at what point will people be sick and tired of every other post on Facebook and Instagram being an ad that they can no longer skip, instead of the people they follow or are friends with? What happens when the masses start to exit because the platform is no longer serving the purpose they came for in the first place?

All of this has brought me back to a place of asking myself, “How can I effectively advertise without META?” If they using my content to train AI anyway, why would I continue to use them? (This comes a week after I received an email from META refusing to allow me to opt out of the AI data training system with my posts and data.

I’m beginning to find the grassroots approach much more effective: reaching out to news stations, radio stations, newspapers, partnering with other organizations/companies that have robust email lists, sharing on SubStack (while it’s good lol), word of mouth, referral programs, messaging people directly, post cards, posters, etc.

I would love to hear your thoughts below or your best MLM story.