>What the article describes is a degenerate for of Viral Marketing (as presented on Seth Godin's original book "Unleashing the idea virus"). This is something many companies did for years, which is to pay "influencers" or common people to ust recommend products for a profit.
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>Viral marketing can be "ethical" when you just provide a good service and let other people know by means of the service itself, or by generating a high level of fidelity on your customers. Indeed, I guess UT unconsciously grew on that idea. People coming here for help and a decent environment to learn quickly got hooked, and then, the first thing many of them though when someone asked where to get help was "Don't you tried at Universal Thread?".
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>Typical examples of Viral Marketing were the old Hotmail footer ("get your free email account at Hotmail") when free email seemed like a fairy tale, or the famous Google Search no-nonsense page. In the early days, when we all were early adopters and people came to us asking how to find something on the net, we sent them to Google. They couldn't possibly missunderstand how to use it. If you sent them to Yahoo, they could easily get lost on the several options they had.
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>Of course these were some of the most succesful examples. When everyone started trying the same, things went less pretty.

Interesting, thanks for the additional information