Originally Posted by REALnetworkmarketing

The problem with Global Domains International (GDI) isn't just the domain names they resell. It's the wider picture: there are good reasons why GDI seems to appear as a core component of most downline building programs in the bottom end of the make-money-from-home market, and they tend to all be related to the BIG Five Failure Factors in any business, online or offline…

• Fear of Loss
• Greed
• Laziness
• Ignorance
• Gullibility (or, if you keep falling for it, outright stupidity)

GDI is a clever marketing company. It markets domain names in the .ws domain space, promoting them as standing for "Web Site". It also bundles web hosting packages with those domain names.

The simple reality is that .ws stands for Western Samoa — one of the most tightly-controlled and restrictive domain spaces in the world.

GDI is not a domain registrar, either, despite the impression created by its company name. It's a re-seller. Its real business is web hosting, marketed using an MLM compensation system.

The real target market for its services is two groups, as is usually the case in network marketing:

1. retail customers who buy the hosting/domain name packages and,
2. distributors who promote and sell those packages.

The primary qualification for retail customers is inexperience and ignorance of web hosting and domain name registration. This is important, because GDI's prices are significantly higher than most web hosting companies (up to 400% or more), which is easy to discover if you have even a basic knowledge of Internet search.

The real target audience seems to be prospective distributors who want to make money. This is where the main thrust of its marketing is directed.

So people join to earn income from recruiting people to use and promote over-priced web hosting and domain names... the greedy and inexperienced selling to the greedy or to the ignorant and gullible, in a nutshell.

The closest comparable business model I can recall is the notorious SkyBiz2000, the largest illegal pyramid selling scheme in history. It sold basically the same offering to exactly the same target audiences.

The fundamental difference is that GDI doesn't promote an illegal pyramid selling system.

It uses a legitimate MLM structure — but this adds to the cost of the product/service dramatically.

Those downline building programs that GDI is so often linked with appear to offer a solution to the biggest challenges facing people in network marketing and Internet marketing — lead generation and multiple income streams.

So what are the problems?

• They target the very bottom end of the market.
• They end up full of the same people as all the other programs.
• The owners are constantly shutting down and opening up new programs as they run out of people, starting the cycle all over again.
• People get tired of dealing with the deluge of emails they receive every day from their uplines in these programs.
• Multiple income streams? It's really the same people paying multiple times. It rarely lasts, because those at the bottom can't earn enough.

As always, it's a case of "buyer beware".


Hope this helps.

John Counsel

Originally Posted by REALnetworkmarketing

Yeah... I actually helped to bring it down, in two ways:

1. I was one of the 7-member Advisory Board of the MLMTruth Coalition at the time. We worked with several regulatory authorities and carried out some serious investigatory work. At least one of our team received credible death threats when we began investigating links between one behind-the-scenes SkyBiz2000 owner and the Mob. (A personal visit by well-dressed characters toting photos of his children and suggesting that there was nothing to investigate seems to me to be credible.)

2. No government agencies seemed willing to do anything as this scam spread its tentacles across the world because it was Internet based and operated out of Bermuda, where they had no jurisdiction. I wrote in one of my business columns (in Australia) an outline for using Australia's Trade Practices Act to bring the whole thing down by forgetting about the company and pursuing individual distributors. About six months later Australia's Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) gained a conviction of a targeted distributor in the Federal Court. Within 10 days, SkyBiz2000 was out of business world-wide as reps panicked and bailed out as fast as they could. The ACCC action was a step-by-step implementation of the strategy I'd published.

I've been involved in a number of other successful campaigns to bring down scams, especially in network marketing. It gives me no joy because of the damage done to so many gullible people, but at least I take comfort from helping to stop that damage — until another clone appears and the same gullible people flock to it all over again.

John

Originally Posted by REALnetworkmarketing

So what are the problems?

• ....
• Multiple income streams? It's really the same people paying multiple times. It rarely lasts, because those at the bottom can't earn enough.

John Counsel