I'm not sure I'd regard making 100's of thousands of dollars complete failure. Now, it's obvious that he made money in ways that aren't overly useful to society, and promoted products that were less than stellar in spammy ways, but just having the goal of "Making Money Online" I'd consider that money to be pretty dang successful.
The fact that he blew it all after the fact just makes him bad with money. It doesn't mean that the attempts to make money online were failures, just that his personal finances were.
P.S. Not in any way condoning the things he did, and you can definitely argue it's a failure in that it didn't build a sustainable business. I don't feel like I'd call it complete failure though. Lots of people try to do the same thing and make dozens of dollars :-)
In his shoes, I would definitely call it a complete failure. It was certainly very educational, but failure nonetheless. I think his failure lies in equating making money with success.
The purpose of commerce is to help us create value for one another. But there is a bunch of activity that uses the same tools that is essentially parasitic. The reason his income streams kept blowing up was that people eventually decided that they were better off without him involved.
He could have spent 10 years building products that were creating value. He could have spent 10 years learning the tools and techniques necessary to make the sorts of thing where customers can't get enough. Instead, he spent a decade as a leech on the ankle of the economy, getting scratched off and reattaching himself.
I could have gone the same way. In high school I had a job doing telephone fundraising. It turned out to be basically a scam, with ~12% of the money collected even going to the non-profit, and therefore even less being spent on actual beneficial work. There was a lot that was appealing in the work: smart, funny people; great challenges; getting paid in cash. But eventually I came to realize how morally bankrupt it was. I got lucky in that it was much easier to see how what I was doing was worthless.
So now he's basically starting over. And good for him, I say. I think this post is incredibly brave, and I wish him the best of luck in making something so useful that customers are clamoring to hand over their money.
perhaps (obviously, completely) personally it was a failure, but the title was referring to making money online. Maybe the failure isn't connected to that specifically? I dunno. I mean I mostly agree with everything you said, just trying to point out that he did in fact make a decent amount of money online whereas a lot of people try the same types of things without making anywhere near the amount of money he did.
The reason his income streams kept blowing up is because they were all basically scams and/or spam exploiting early Internet search and advertising schemes, which in pretty short order either collapsed or got wise.
Which is good to see, in a way. As scammy and spammy as the web is today, this shows it could be worse. Hopefully today's scammers are chasing a moving target too, and with any luck having even less success. I'm not certain that's the case (some of the crap seems to have just gotten institutionalized) but one can hope.
"Now, it's obvious that he made money in ways that aren't overly useful to society.."
FYI making markets more efficient is definitely useful to society by reducing costs / bid ask spread. In particular this helps those who get the most utility from this savings, the poor and middle class.
Obviously I'm setting aside the ethics of some of his ways and speaking in general. (Although you'd probably want this competition even more so in unethical markets because at least those markets are then more efficient for those getting scammed, ie the poor and stupid.)
Actually I'm happy with making markets more efficient. I have no problem with affiliate marketing in general. I was more referring to the fact that some of the things he was marketing were scams.
Yes, I'd call that successful too. The expectations were too high, tough.
I'm not sure why people are focusing so much on the fact that the money was obtained, but nothing useful was created. How different is it from, say, high frequency trading?
There is a very widespread idea that if you can get rich doing something, that alone makes it worth doing. Lotta people see dollar signs, and equate that with having done something good.
HFT is useful, it provides liquidity to buyers and sellers and lowers their spreads to razor thin levels saving them a ton of money in the process. To say HFT isn't creating value and isn't useful is simply wrong.
The fact that he blew it all after the fact just makes him bad with money. It doesn't mean that the attempts to make money online were failures, just that his personal finances were.
P.S. Not in any way condoning the things he did, and you can definitely argue it's a failure in that it didn't build a sustainable business. I don't feel like I'd call it complete failure though. Lots of people try to do the same thing and make dozens of dollars :-)