Dirty Little Secret of MLM: the NOT-Endorsements

Are you impressed if a certain "prestigious industry journal" has featured the company you are considering of joining as an affiliate, as "company of the month"? Sure you have! Esp. if your upline hands you one such magazine or reprint of such, all printed on glossy 40 pound paper in full color, impressive!

One such example is a pretty famous "Network Marketing Business Journal", published by Dr. Keith Laggos, MLM industry veteran. (See sample cover to the right, provided by their own website)

NMBJ  feature one company per issue, but few if any read the disclaimer (bold added for emphasis):

All information contained in this feature article is provided by the featured company.
The act of publishing a story should not be construed as an endorsement or judgement
of the featured company by Network Marketing Business Journal. Network Marketing Business Journal assumes no responsibility for performance, integrity or claims made by the featured company.

In other words, we "feature" them, but if they turned out to be crooks, it ain't our fault. They wrote it, we just print it. 


(Preceding disclaimer was copied verbatim from one such "republished excerpt")

Now why would any magazine do that? Here's the dirty little secret... this "featured company" likely agreed to buy large amounts of issues or republished excerpts in exchange for this... feature article and their cover status.



It is well known that a competing magazine to NMBJ, known as "Success from Home", costs $330000 to get featured. Of course, the $330000 are for the purchases of the magazines, NOT the endorsement, they said, but this is stated by no less than USA TODAY

... Companies that are featured on the cover of Success From Home agree to buy at least $330,000 worth of issues, according to a description of the prerequisites obtained by USA TODAY.  (Link here)

Do you really expect NMBJ to charge anything less than $100000 to "feature" a company? Indeed, a RUMOR (unconfirmed) spread that ZeekRewards bought at least $100000 worth of reprints to get itself featured on NMBJ's April 2012 issue. Oh, and yes, ZeekRewards also hired Dr. Keith Laggos, the publisher of NMBJ, as a consultant. *THAT* is confirmed.

But they don't really tell you that sort of stuff when you read the slick magazines, do they?

So is the "feature article" a carefully rewritten piece of journalism, done by an industry expert, with full analysis of the risks and rewards? 


Or is it merely an advertorial?

Beware of not-endorsements and conflicts of interest. 


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