How M.L.M. world works on Instagram and TikTok

A guest post from Bridget Read

Greetings from Read Max HQ! This bonus edition of the newsletter is a guest post from my friend and former coworker Bridget Read. (No relation, though you are allowed to call this specific newsletter, and only this newsletter, “Read Bridget.”) Read’s new book Little Bosses Everywhere, on the proliferation and influence of multi-level marketing scams and pyramid schemes, is out this Tuesday. You can read an excerpt here at The Cut; I started it this week and suspect it will be a book I think about often as I write about the business models and social structures of online.

For Read Max (“Read Bridget”), Bridget has written about what is maybe the most familiar aspect of M.L.M. in 2025: The come-on video, the above excellent parody of which she and filmmaker Casey Feldman have edited together. I hope you enjoy, and recommend you pre-order her book here. Please note: To be thematically consistent with the subject of this post, I may receive a small affiliate payment if you order her book through the links in this post.

Anatomy of a business opportunity

By Bridget Read

If you’ve been online, you’ve seen them. Swipe through a few TikTok videos or Instagram Reels and you're almost guaranteed to start coming across slick but categorically vague solicitations from all manner of sponsors, mentors, coaches, and advisors who want you to benefit from the opportunities they've discovered. Chipper women talking about working from home, online income, taking control of your life. Click the link in bio, join their channel, buy their done-for-you passive income plan.

Maybe you have even yourself been tempted to click through on these videos--if only to figure out what the catch is. What you’re seeing is not (necessarily) spam, or slop, or some strange new social-media trend, but the fruits of a proud, longstanding, highly profitable American “industry”: the multi-level marketing scheme, or M.L.M.

M.L.M. works like this: Sponsors, or "uplines," claim to be selling products--from Amway’s “Glister” toothpaste to expensive makeup to sex toys to crypto advice--but their main objective is really to recruit new participants into the scheme, onto whom they can offload the products they’ve bought. Sponsors are paid the most based on how big the group under them (their "downline") becomes, and how much they are buying. Most people have a hard time recruiting and lose their investment, while a tiny group prospers.

If this concept sounds like a pyramid scheme, that’s because there is much evidence that there is no real difference between pyramid schemes and M.L.M. And yet M.L.M. remains legal in America, and has enriched some of the world’s most powerful people, among them Donald Trump, Warren Buffett, and former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy Devos. Partly this is because the Amway founders, one of whom is Betsy’s father-in-law, effectively bought political cover for M.L.M. in 1979 and have only increased their wealth and influence since.

M.L.M. has always relied on exactly on the kind of persuasive, manipulative storytelling now proliferating across Instagram. In the 1970s, when Amway recruiters used to pitch their prospects, they started with something they called “The Rut.” The Rut was the drudgery of 9-to-5 work: clocking in and clocking out, shitty bosses, long hours and small paychecks. As you sat in your shag-carpeted living room, they'd hammer you with the bleakness of your life in The Rut--and then smooth it all over with The Dream, a gleaming future world where you'd drive a Cadillac, own a lake house, and take off for vacation whenever you wanted.

The way to get from The Rut to The Dream was simple, the recruiters (called "sponsors") would say in. But it was a secret. A secret so special they couldn’t even name it yet. They'd only say it was the opportunity of a lifetime, and if you were meant to take it--if the universe had chosen you to be the master of your own destiny--you would want to know more. And you’d better act fast because there were more people who would say “yes” first if you didn’t act now.

If you’ve lingered on any M.L.M. Reels in your Instagram feed you know things haven’t changed much since then. The main difference between the in-person pitches of the 1970s and the video pitches of the 2020s is that technology makes it a lot easier to lie about the opportunity of a lifetime at scale. In presenting The Dream, Amway recruits used to do things like conduct their pitches in front of a yacht club to pretend to be a member. Now you can just rent a nice AirBnb for the day, film there, and post it for eternity. Or you can just use AI to fake the background entirely.

MLMers now use social media so heavily they often call it “social selling,” the latest in the long trend of M.L.M. attaching itself to emerging and under-regulated industries to capture hype about “getting in on the ground floor.” In the 90s, M.L.M. sprouted up around cell phone service and broadband. In the 2000s, they sold high speed Internet, or “work from home” based “digital” businesses. Even Amway rebranded in 2007 to a soon-abandoned sci-fi sounding name “Quixtar.”

Which is why the most enterprising entrepreneurs of our current slop era have abandoned the more cumbersome and absurd parts of M.L.M.--namely, the products. It’s hard to sell your old high school friend a weird, expensive toothpaste--but a more esoteric, less concrete offering like “coaching” might do the trick. Though coaching, affiliate marketing, sales funnels, “Master Reselling Rights” and the world of scammy income-generating schemes that have cropped up since are not all technically M.L.M., they are all downstream from it in that they rely on recruitment to grow rather than whatever easy, risk-free platform they are hawking.

And they all use the same pitch. Once you know what you’re looking at you can spot the telltale signs of the "biz opps" that populate the side-hustle pitches we are served up every day, which tend to take three turns:

1) It still starts with The Rut--references to feeling stuck or unfulfilled, tired or exhausted in the 9 to 5 grind, then teases an unnamed, unexplained opportunity that could change everything. That’s The Secret.

2) “The Secret” looks like some kind of generic business platform: the subject is reading or sitting at a computer or on their phone, and the only description is some kind of finance jargon like “passive income” or “asset accumulation.” There will be references to being one’s own boss or owning your own business. What The Secret is definitely not is college. Don’t go to college! Waste of money when you can be an entrepreneur.

3) Then there is a barrage of depictions of The Lifestyle (which is what we call The Dream now): for women, it’s traveling in exotic locations, participating in girlboss-style events that are reminiscent of a TedX conference, posing in front of a private jet, looking happy and healthy with a gaggle of other women who took the opportunity when they saw it. The music is always some kind of upbeat and stirring Imagine Dragons-style pop that builds as The Lifestyle is presented.

At the end, the viewer still doesn’t know what they’re being sold, what it costs, or what they’re actually being offered--which is almost always because primarily how they make money is on the act of sharing The Lifestyle itself, and getting you to share it, and on and on.

The pitch is so classic that anyone could do it. Even journalists. I enlisted my friend Casey Feldman to watch through hundreds of these videos and make a tongue-in-cheek one for my book.

Even putting it together as a joke I felt how seductive the biz opp can be, how we’re all constantly looking for our One Investment, the one ticket out of The Rut with all the other wage earning drones and up to the moon with the ownership class, a dream that seems to be slipping further and further away. Wouldn’t it be nice if my own book was the one product that changed my life? What a scam.

That all these videos use that same word, opportunity, isn’t a coincidence, or a sales tactic: It's a legal imperative. In the rut-and-dream 1970s, when multi-level marketing was rampant, the F.T.C. tried to crack down on the operating structure with a "Franchise Rule," which would have subjected anyone trying to obtain investment in their business venture to a slew of rules and disclosures. Those disclosures--like, say, average earnings--would have spelled disaster for Amway, in which almost no one who participates makes any money, so the M.L.M. lobby (through their trade organization the Direct Selling Association, still around today) pitched the F.T.C. on an exception: If the investment to join an M.L.M. scheme was less than $500 then it wasn’t technically a "franchise," it was a business opportunity, or a biz opp. The F.T.C. acquiesced, and a loophole was born. A few years later, the F.T.C. declined to shut down Amway as a pyramid scheme, legalizing the whole industry.

Now, some 50 years later, videos like these multiply across social media, all slipping through the same "business opportunity" loophole that M.L.M. created--which is why they can make wild, life-changing promises without even naming what they do. The Trump administration--which fired the Democratic F.T.C. commissioners who just a few months earlier had supported passing a new Business Opportunity rule that would include M.L.M. loophole that the Trump administration--seems intent on widening the loophole by hobbling or eliminating the agencies that can shut down investments scams, like the C.F.P.B.

But M.L.M. also persists because it fulfills a specific ideological function: helping to sell the success of American capitalism. It promises abundance for all through an infinitely expansive market, telling its recruits, independent contractors toiling at the bottom of the pyramid, that we all have an equal chance to be at the top of our own downline one day and escape. Which is why M.L.M.-style scams have proliferated on the internet, where hyping is endemic. In M.L.M. the line will always, always go up, and the benefits are ours to miss out on.