The war to sell you a mattress

Then there are the channels that thrive on drama and conflict. One particular guitar reviewer is an older chap, with questionable playing skills and knowledge, but he excels in riling up companies, which in turn leads to more publicity and views for him.

He is well known for taking expensive electronic gear apart and saying things like "I can't believe they charge $2000 for this guitar effects processor when I know the motherboard and DSP chips on here only cost $200... etc.". When the company refutes these claims or tried to explain, he shuts them down with demands for payment to remove his negative reviews etc.

We cannot expect much more though - a whole generation of audience has been trained to seek out such drama and negative energy and latch on to it like a remora to a shark.

Multi level marketing (MLM) schemes are situations in which people make money, or are promised money, based on their ability to recruit additional affiliate salespeople. The typical MLM pitch is "if you sell product X, we'll give you a (typically huge) sum of money, and also if you convince someone else to enter into this same agreement, we'll give you a different (usually smaller) sum of money, and what's more you'll get money for every sale that recruit makes, any people they recruit, and any sales they make, recursively on down the tree."

The con is usually in the fact that product X is difficult née impossible to sell, and that entering into such an agreement in the first place requires payment into the scheme. Those factors result in the people towards the "root" of the tree making tons of money simply from the fact that more people are getting recruited and paying in at lower levels. They make money from the tree growing, even though the leaves are not making sales.

This is widely considered unethical (and illegal, in some cases) since its primary profit engine is recruitment under usually-false pretenses. MLM can be practiced ethically between a given two parties, but usually only makes money due to subsequent unethical practices (e.g. one seasoned affiliate marketeer agrees to be a recruit of another such seasoned salesperson in a multilevel scheme, knowing full well the behavior of the scheme; they then both go on to enrich themselves and each other by shilling unsuspecting rubes with the typical "you can work your own hours, get tons of money, and, if you grow your network big enough, rake in the cash while your recruits do all the hard work!" sell concealing the "...for a nominal [signup|monthly|etc] fee" hook).

Edit: removed accidentally repeated repeated words.