Ted's Woodworking / Woodprix don't pay for the plans!

I have been aware of "Ted's woodworking" with his "16,000 woodworking plans" for some time. From time to time I get emails from people who want to buy an ad on my website to try to sell the plans. If I have the sense that they are new to advertising, I point out that I don't take ads for the "16,000 woodworking plans" scam in my initial response, because that's usually what they are trying to sell.

On review, it's apparent that Ted's Woodworking is a clever sort of scam. Basically, whoever it is behind ted's woodworking encourages affiliates to sell the plans, paying 75% commission on a $67 "product". That sounds very attractive, especially if you believe the claims about conversion rate (percentage of people who buy) on the site. Enough people believe the get rich hype and sign up as affiliates to try to sell the plans. This creates a huge number of affiliates. Each affiliate, in turn, creates links back to Ted's Woodworking, which raises Ted's profile to Google, and makes tedswoodworking.com the second search result on Google (after ads) when searching for "woodworking plans". Even affiliates that never sell a single copy help boost Ted's page on Google. And if you find Ted's Woodworking using a Google search, Ted doesn't have to pay anybody a commission. So even affiliates that never sell a single copy help Ted. I suspect the primary motivation for having affiliates is to boost Ted's page, rather than generating affiliate sales. With 80% commission, direct sales are 5x as valuable to Ted as affiliate sales.