A dozen versions, sold by dozens of manufacturers. Android is so fragmented it's hard to actually consider it a single thing. It's like saying "4.5 million computers are sold every 3 days".
The iPad is one thing, made by one company, that comes in two sizes.
Moreover, people don't want to pay Comcast for the modem, but I guarantee you everyone who remembers that they lost a modem will declare it with their insurance company.
Haha. Good stuff, good stuff. People pooling money to get their hands on a document. A PDF so amazing that it isn't a PDF, it's a product. Knowledge so secret, and so powerful that it's worth hundreds or thousands of dollars.
If you really made a 15x return from reading a couple pages, why are you here? Why don't you do it again and again? When are you buying your private jet?
Now, it's possible you did make $3,000. It's not hard to make $3,000 off of Adsense, or even as an Amazon affiliate. But you probably put in hundreds of hours of time for that 15x return. Because if you could really make $3,000 in a few hours from following some easy steps in a PDF, you'd do it over and over again.
I see plenty of people trying to participate in this stuff and fail to realize that even when they do actually turn a profit, they are making minimum wage when they factor in their own labor costs. Usually they choose not to, because it's just depressing. It's pretty easy to lie to others, but the easiest person to lie to is yourself.
Those are the exact sort of scams I'm talking about. Lead gen to get a free PDF that then strings you along and tries to get you to buy "products" that are just fake empowerment nonesense. If you don't buy into it, they sell your info to boiler rooms. Every one of these sites look the same. Same layout, same language. It's all the same. Show me something different.
If any of these so-called products had any value, you'd be able to find them on torrent sites. That's the true test of value for a digital good at the end of the day. If it has value, people will try to steal it and share it. People look to pirate a $0.99 song, but no one looks to pirate an "info product", because the value is literally zero. Or negative.
Unless they are scamming people really hard and selling info to boiler rooms nonstop to run serious scams, you probably don't.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of desperate people out there who will buy a $99 PDF with vague promises of "CEO income from home" and all that nonsense, but you still have to buy people. Yes, you can engineer a pyramid scheme into the program, but that only goes so far.
There are a few career people who do this professionally, but they are few and far between and they've spent decades figuring out what scams work and what scams don't. Most of the people on Hacker News want to start real businesses, that sell real products, that do real things. There are other forums out there for career snakeoil salesmen.
I have never seen an "info product" in my life that was honest, or actually added value to society. Ever. I've expensed a number of them for research throughout the years, mostly to try and get a better understanding of the dynamics behind the quasi-viral spread of these things. I've never seen a legitimate one, even successful ones by pro-scam artists, that really struck me as a worth while business venture compared to all other alternatives out there. It's only when you get into straight up fraud that it really starts to "make sense" from a profits standpoint.
What I have seen a lot of is people who look like they are doing well because their cashflow has gotten so massive. $20k, $30k, $40k+/mo is not unreasonable. But the expenses grow as well, and eventually you have to pay out or the scheme collapses. So you have the cash-flow and credit to buy a fancy car or rent a fancy house, but you can't actually ever own anything unless you cross the line and start defrauding people.
I don't know anyone who actually makes that much in profit.
Most info products leverage information asymmetry. They aren't really "products" in my mind, much closer to scams than anything else. They find ignorant people, string them along, and then sell them information that is either worthless or available for free with the vague promise of "making money online", whatever that means. In some cases the information actually has negative value because it's so wrong.
Some people DO get large checks at the end of the month running this kind of scam, but those same people also spend thousands per month on paid advertising trying to shovel people into their lead capture system. Adwords, CPM buys on shady networks, whatever works.
I don't know of, and have never seen any evidence that you can, actually make £15-25k per month in profit. They usually leave that part out. If you are selling some worthless ebook for $10, you can push plenty of them through Adwords alone, but it's not going to be free, and worthless info products don't scale well once you deplete the initial pool of ignorance. You'd be much better off with fiction, actually.
The whole of "Internet Marketing" is people pretending like they are making bank, but they have little net worth and they put in insanely long hours to walk away with very little profit. Most of that "4hr work week garbage" is the same thing.