How social media fuels useless products

Source: How social media fuels useless products, Matt D’Avella, 15:20, uploaded 2025-09-30, Watch Later position 337.

Matt D’Avella starts with a handheld banana slicer, a miniature keyboard vacuum, and a shower hair catcher. These objects look useful for a few seconds, then end up in a drawer or the bin. The system behind them turns social feeds into a 24-hour shopping channel in which cheap products are designed for the camera, pushed through attention tactics, and sold through business models that reward manufacturing demand.

The new infomercial

D’Avella’s feed recently turned into a parade of products that solve problems most people had never felt. A designer cover hides a trash bin. A wheel-spun bread cutter slices a loaf. Wine glasses get detachable stems. An egg-yolk separator takes the shape of a basketball hoop, and a decorative cover goes over the toilet seat. He remembers childhood as a time when each new object could feel like Christmas. The feed offers the same promise in smaller, more disposable forms.

The older version of this promise came through As Seen on TV infomercials. Their products were cheap and odd, and the sales pitches ran through the night. One clip demonstrates a flexible “flavorizer” that injects marinade into meat. Another features a paid actor who says, with solemn disbelief, “I couldn’t believe how juicy these burgers came out.” D’Avella finds the performance funny because its certainty exposes the sales script.

The social-media version keeps the same basic structure and removes the waiting. A seller films a phone demonstration, cuts it to trending audio, and publishes a short clip that makes the object look novel, visual, and close to miraculous. The video can then activate novelty, scarcity, social proof, impulse buying, and the satisfaction of watching an oddly clean demonstration repeat itself. Short clips, one-page checkouts, Apple Pay, Google Pay, bundles, and fear of missing out reduce the distance between seeing the object and owning it.

D’Avella says these tactics do not require buyers to be stupid. They are built to move around deliberate evaluation. A swipeable clip is easier to watch than a 30-minute infomercial, easier to share, and easier to buy from. In the video, he shows how quickly the process works by buying a car vacuum advertised with NASA-level suction, a balance board, and an electric bird feeder that takes photographs of backyard birds. He had wanted none of them when he woke up.

The scale is part of the pressure. D’Avella cites an electric crepe maker with 135 million views. Its account uploads the same post again and again, hoping for another algorithmic hit. Most posts receive tens of thousands of views, whilst a few reach millions. The seller only needs the right combination of views, clicks, and purchases often enough for the stream to become a business.

Affiliate links and manufactured need

The first business model is affiliate marketing. A seller shares a special link to a product and receives a commission when someone buys through it. The link identifies the sale, so the business depends on attention, traffic, and clicks. The content can take the form of a YouTube video, blog post, or boosted Instagram reel that presents a product’s supposed benefits.

D’Avella cites Amazon as the largest and most sophisticated affiliate programme, with more than 900,000 affiliates worldwide. He says home and beauty products can pay commissions of up to 8 or 10 percent in the right niche. He then looks at the Instagram account The Sisters Shoppers, which has more than 750,000 followers and nearly 800 product posts. Its catalogue includes a nugget ice maker, a pizza storage container, and a drink dispenser. The joke in the video is that even pouring milk over cereal can be framed as an arduous task that requires a new object.

The account posts almost every day. Some videos reach millions of views, and commenters ask for links. An automated system replies with the creator’s unique affiliate URL. A comment therefore becomes part of the sales path, whilst the product demonstration keeps producing traffic after publication.

D’Avella separates this model from every use of affiliate links. He sometimes receives a small commission when he recommends a book, product, or service that he values. He says he made about $150 per month on average that year, most of it from a video about The Courage to Be Disliked. The income helps with groceries, yet he does not build his work around optimising it for sales.

The accounts built around “must-haves” follow a different incentive. D’Avella thinks it is unlikely that their operators use each product or find it helpful. They search for objects that might go viral and generate commissions. The system therefore creates artificial needs before it recommends anything. The product matters because it can produce a compelling clip, and the clip matters because it can produce a trackable sale.

Drop shipping and the large markup

Affiliate marketing gives the seller a small cut. Drop shipping lets the seller set the price. The operator finds a cheap product, often through a factory or marketplace in China, places it in an online shop, and keeps the difference between the supplier’s price and the customer’s payment. The seller never needs to hold stock. After an order arrives, a third party packs and sends the object directly to the customer.

D’Avella describes the usual sequence. The seller searches AliExpress for a product with viral potential, orders a sample, and films a satisfying demonstration. A shop and a brand give the account somewhere to send interested viewers. Paid advertising can amplify the post. A drop-shipping app forwards each order to the supplier, who handles dispatch. The operator repeats the process with another object.

He examines an Instagram account called Olivia, which has more than 391,000 followers and promotes a different object in each post. The products include a handheld mop, a bed tucker, and a rocking footrest. D’Avella traces the objects to AliExpress and compares the account’s prices with the supplier listings. The bed tucker sells for $14.94 against a$ 3.13 listing, whilst the footrest sells for $49.41 against a$ 7.31 listing. The figures come from the video’s own comparisons, rather than from an independently checked catalogue.

Thomas Despin, whom the video identifies as a retired drop shipper, describes the model in a Medium article: the seller marks up an item that anyone can find and ships it more slowly than the established e-commerce companies. The product does not gain value through design, service, or a lasting relationship with its buyer. The margin comes from the distance between a viral presentation and the supplier page.

The comments show why the model can work. People repeatedly ask for the link to the footrest. Their interest supplies social proof, more content for the account, and a route into the seller’s shop. A product can look absurd to an observer and still convert when the clip makes it feel timely, legible, and easy to own.

Course sellers and failed margins

The model has a second risk. D’Avella says that some drop shippers report hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in yearly revenue, whilst many more fail. Comments from a business subreddit describe low margins, the need for high volume, and the time spent answering questions about late deliveries. Advertising, payment processing, shipping, refunds, and customer service eat into a markup that looked large on the product page.

New sellers face another cost. An established creator can publish to an existing audience, but most beginners start without followers and pay for advertising. A 60-times markup can disappear once the seller pays to make the product visible and deals with the consequences of selling it. The account may spend its time handling unhappy customers whilst the margin vanishes.

D’Avella also points to the people selling courses about drop shipping. Michael Craig, the founder of the Dojo co-working space, objects to a $6,000 course sold to somebody who puts their savings into a business where dozens of other students learn to sell the same avocado slicer. The promise of easy online income becomes another product in the same economy, with the course seller collecting money from people who have yet to sell anything.

Waste, money, and attention

The video treats consumerism as the system beneath both affiliate marketing and drop shipping. Discussions in these communities focus on making money, whilst the source of that money receives little attention. Advertising follows people from site to site and keeps offering another object that promises a small flicker of satisfaction.

Millions of products enter marketplaces such as Temu, Amazon, Alibaba, and AliExpress. The objects move through homes, drawers, landfills, incinerators, and oceans. D’Avella borrows a point from an expert in the documentary Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy: there is no magical place called “away” where discarded things stop existing.

He recognises the limit of an environmental appeal. A person can feel little personal responsibility for cheap online purchases whilst billionaires burn through more carbon dioxide in a weekend than that person could produce through a lifetime of buying small products. D’Avella includes himself in the problem. He bought a banana slicer as a prop for the video and jokes that he will return it as a change of mind because Jeff Bezos.

His stronger reason for resisting these products concerns the buyer’s own life. The objects consume money, space, and attention. They train people to look for the next must-have instead of noticing what they already own. The video connects this to product use and reward loops and to marketing as context, where the frame around an object changes what it seems to offer.

The response is deliberately small. People still decide how to spend their money and attention, even inside a feed designed to make every decision feel immediate. Wanting fewer things frees space in a home and makes attention available for the things that matter to a person. The banana slicer can still look appealing. That attraction does not need to become a purchase.

Limits

The available evidence consists of public posts, product listings, comments, and quoted material. The view counts, follower counts, commission rates, prices, and claims about the scale of affiliate marketing remain figures as presented by D’Avella. The description supplies no links to the accounts, the product comparisons, Thomas Despin’s Medium article, the subreddit comments, or the documentary expert’s underlying research. The drop-shipping account is identified only as Olivia, so it does not provide independently verified evidence of a typical seller.

The products themselves also remain under-described. Some may be genuinely useful to particular people, even when the video uses them as examples of manufactured demand. The sales system rewards an object for its ability to make a compelling short clip and convert attention into a purchase. That incentive can exist alongside real utility, yet the video gives no reason to assume that utility drives the accounts it examines.