THWEI. TNNZEET. BUXKR. Just some of the reliable Amazon brands that make it possible to get pants
delivered to you with the urgency of a new kidney. But did it ever occur to you that when browsing
Amazon, you don’t actually recognize, like, 90% of the brands on there anymore? I mean, sure,
they’ve got the big names if you look for them, but why are most results these companies that
you’ve never heard of? What is BUXKR? Who runs BUXKR? Do they sit at a desk in a big building
with the word BUXKR on it? Are kids these days getting bullied for not having the latest BUXKR
merch? Are you just out of touch, or is there something more here? Well, if you’re watching
this channel you probably are out of touch, but there is also something more here. These brands
don’t really exist outside of Amazon—if you look them up, you’re not going to find storefronts,
or websites, or big buildings with their names on them. These brands—or pseudo-brands—are actually
part of a very tricky e-commerce scheme that takes advantage of the way Amazon functions these days,
and they’re not just gunking up your online shopping feed: they’ve also nearly destroyed
the US Patent and Trademark Office in the process. So, how did Amazon get so overrun with PVENDORs,
YUIOPs, and JOYOLDELFs in the first place? Well, that’s kind of a long story. When Amazon first
started, the way it distributed products was pretty simple. You’d order a book on
Amazon—which was the only type of thing you could order on Amazon back then—and then Amazon would
turn around and buy that book directly from a larger book distributor or wholesaler and send
it to you. One of the few reasons that this was remotely sustainable was that these wholesalers
kept prices down by requiring Amazon to buy in bulk, so Jeff Bezos would scam them by buying
one copy of the book he needed and then he’d fill out the rest of the order with a whole
bunch of copies of an unnamed obscure book about lichen that none of them ever had in stock, all
of which would then immediately get refunded. But Jeff aspired to greater things than scamming book
wholesalers—he wanted to be the buffest, baldest, richest man the world had ever seen, so in 1998,
Amazon started selling other stuff. And sure enough, they were pretty good at that too,
so a few years later, Jeff had the wise idea of letting other people sell stuff on Amazon
using Amazon’s infrastructure: this is where things get complicated. Some items on Amazon
work the old-fashioned way: they’re owned by Amazon, stored in Amazon warehouses,
and shipped by Amazon. Other items are almost completely disconnected from Amazon’s supply
chain: they’re owned by other companies, stored off-site, and shipped by someone else—you just
purchase them through Amazon’s website, but that’s about it. And then some items are in between:
they might be owned by other companies, but stored or shipped by Amazon. And this system
has worked pretty well, because it means that Amazon doesn’t actually have to buy and house all
40,000 different funny hats that come up when you search “funny hat” on their website. But it also
comes with certain risks, because accurately vetting 350 million different products is about as
hard as accurately vetting 350 million different products sounds. Amazon has frequently gotten in
trouble for selling hair dryers that kill you if exposed to water, children’s pajamas that have the
unfortunate tendency to catch on fire, and carbon monoxide detectors that are purely decorative.
So, in 2015, Amazon came up with a plan to stop accidentally lighting children on fire: Amazon
Brand Registry. The idea was that if you wanted to be a third-party seller on Amazon and have
your products actually get pushed in the search engine, you had to enroll in this new system,
but enrolling in this new system required having a registered trademark on a brand name. What Amazon
hoped would happen is that the US Patent and Trademark Office would be able to sift out the
extra-flammable pajamas before they actually hit the market. What actually happened is that the US
Patent and Trademark Office was almost destroyed. So, it turns out, it’s not actually that hard to
trademark a brand name as long as that brand name totally sucks. If you’re
trying to trademark a name that’s coherent and uses real English words, like, I don’t know,
Skateboard Cream—don’t try to steal that by the way, it’s my idea—the process will take
a fairly long time because the USPTO has a lot of work to do in order to prove its distinctiveness.
But if you file to trademark a meaningless string of letters, like RLENOIUML or VOX,
chances are, there won’t be any competition and it’ll go right through. So, all of a sudden, the
most efficient way to get your product listed on Amazon—assuming you’re not already a recognizable
company—is to file, in the United States, for the worst trademark you can think of. And sure enough,
the US Patent and Trademark Office wasn’t too happy about this, because they were now knee-deep
in applications that were designed to be as lazy as possible. They had to bring it to congress,
it was a whole thing, and seemingly it’s still a really big problem, but, uh… whatever.
A much more interesting question remains: how do these products actually compete when their
brands are so intentionally bad? Well, the answer, apparently, is that you don’t care. For the most
part, these third-party sellers target product categories with very little brand loyalty; stuff
that you kind of just need quickly and cheaply: HDMI cables, measuring cups, dog wigs, things
like that. Obviously, you don’t want to buy a HMBGSFD pacemaker, but a HMBGSFD ice cream scoop?
Why not. And that’s not to mention the fact that most of these brands have pretty much nothing to
lose, so they can just buy reviews and clickfarm until they get banned and have to undergo the
arduous process of thinking up another string of meaningless letters to trademark. The lesson is:
the path to riches is laziness, at least if you’re trying to sell ice cream scoops on Amazon.
In an age where the internet is absolutely overrun with garbage products, let me tell you about a
product that I know for certain is not-so-garbage: Nebula. Now I might be a little biased here—I
helped start Nebula four years ago with some of my creator friends, but the concept was simple:
creators know how to make good content on a budget. Therefore, it tracks that if you give them
a little more budget, they can make great content. We did exactly that, and now have a huge catalog
of absolutely incredible Nebula Originals. For example: you know Real Life Lore? He has a series
called Modern Conflicts which is just as good as his videos on YouTube. LegalEagle? He made a class
teaching you how to sue people. PhilosophyTube? She filmed her off-West End play called the
Prince. Real Engineering? He made a phenomenal series called the Logistics of D-Day. Mustard,
Neo, CityBeautiful, Polymatter, TierZoo—I couldn’t possibly name all the creators that have made
Nebula Originals, but it’s a lot, and plenty that the average HAI viewer watches and enjoys:
we actually know that for sure based on our audience crossover analytics. Oh, and we’ve made
Originals too of course, but on top of Originals, the creators all upload their content early and
ad-free on the platform, meaning it’s all in all just a better viewing experience for you. Over
650,000 people are subscribed to Nebula already, and we know they find it worthwhile because
we have one of the lowest subscriber churn and highest monthly active user counts in streaming:
the analytics prove that people are signing up and actually using and enjoying Nebula. And
to top it all off, Nebula is creator-founded and creator-owned: we at Half as Interesting
actually get a cut of your subscription fee for as long as you stay subscribed, as long as you
sign up at Nebula.tv/HAI. Also by using that link you’ll get 40% off an annual plan, so it’s worth
it for both of us—head to Nebula.tv/HAI, and thanks in advance for your support.