It's a weird extension of the historically successful concept of the people who got rich from the Gold Rush of the 19th Century West in the US: Your odds of being successful were much higher selling the shovels and supplies to the high-risk gamblers known as miners.
Yeah. I don't use an ad blocker, and a good 80-90% of the ads I get on YouTube are either obvious scams or sleazy hustles like these. There are multiple companies out there whose business model consists of hawking expensive online "courses" ostensibly coaching people on how to build a stream of passive income by flooding Amazon and/or Audible with books designed to match trending search keywords. These books are supposed to be written as quickly and cheaply as possible, so the trainee is expected to either use genAI (slop) or commission someone willing to ghostwrite for very low wages. Dan Olson of "Folding Ideas" YouTube fame did a
nice little essay on the concept a little while back; rather than waste their time competing with a horde of other saps (miners) in a race to make the internet as bloated and useless as possible, they've set up a "training" program (shovel) that also functions as a sort of multi-level marketing scheme.
That this scam isn't as gross and immoral as the one claiming to teach you how to make money by harassing a woman you found online or who you photographed in public is about the only nice thing I'll say about it.
