Recently, there's been a lot of talk around the digital products platform specifically due to Aman Gadi becoming a co-owner of the platform. In my opinion, this is a bad look for 99% of creators. And in this video, I'm going to tell you five reasons why.
Just before we get started, who am I and why should you listen to me? My name is Jermaine. I've personally made over 700K from YouTube monetization and digital products.
And recently, I made 16K with a new digital product. So everything I say on this channel is from personal experience and everything I teach on this channel actually works. Five reasons WAP is a bad idea for creators selling digital products.
Number one, you don't own the platform or the audience. When you build your business on you don't truly own your customer list. You don't own the analytics and you don't own the platform behavior.
Now this is a huge risk for anyone wanting to build a sustainable creator business. Essentially, WAP is a social media platform for digital products. And as I speak about on this channel all the time, if you are somebody that relies on social media platforms to generate sustainable income, this is not a safe way to build a business because the platform doesn't care about you.
It cares about itself and it cares about generating revenue for itself. This is one of my biggest reservations about this. If you sell digital products on they have all of your data.
They control your data. They have your customer list, your email list, your analytics. And this is something that I don't like.
I don't believe that a creator business should be giving their email list and their business analytics to somebody else so they can exploit them and use them and make money with them for their own personal gain. So, this is the first reason why I think it's a bad idea. You don't truly own the platform and you don't own your audience.
Number two, marketing exploitation. Now, the truth is that is exploiting creators for traffic and profits from your audience. WAP's growth depends on creators bringing their own traffic via YouTube ads and social media.
Essentially, this means that you're paying to grow WP's brand, not yours. The truth is that this day and age when it comes to paid ads on social media, they are very expensive and this can cost businesses millions and millions of dollars to pay for those ads. So, instead, they can get cheaper marketing and cheaper advertising if they can attract creators onto their platform.
So essentially what is doing is they're getting creators to work for them and making them drive traffic to the platform. This is literally like being a McDonald's employee except you've got a W badge on your uniform and you are working for rushing around and driving traffic to the W platform making money for in advertising revenue and saving WP millions of dollars and then not paying you anything for it. So this is another reason why marketing exploitation I don't like it.
Number three is platform dependency and algorithm risk. Warp's discover features like explore favor viral or promoted products. This means you're at the mercy of Warp's algorithm changes just like YouTube and Instagram's unpredictable shifts.
Again, if you're somebody that has a creator business, and you rely on social media algorithms, this turns you into a slave, but it also puts you in a very vulnerable position. Algorithms are very unpredictable. They only favor certain types of people and certain types of topics.
Relying on algorithms is the exact reason why most creators are broke on YouTube and Instagram and all social media platforms because they rely on algorithms and they don't build their audience in a predictable and sustainable way that actually allows them to monetize that audience effectively. Number four is saturation and commoditization. is a marketplace meaning you compete with thousands of creators selling similar digital products and this can draw you into the comparison trap making you feel pressured to work harder and sell more.
Now when I say this just like school W has a leaderboard and it puts the most successful sellers at the top of that leaderboard. Now the reality is the most successful sellers most of them are extremely famous or they have massive marketing teams behind them. They use paid ads and also they're highly favored by the platform because the platform wants to market their platform in a certain way and they want certain creators to appear to be more successful.
And a small tiny percentage of these creators get pushed by the platform. They get favored by the platform. They get special treatment.
They get flown out to events. They get an extra push on the platform which leaves 99% of creators pushed out broke and struggling to make any money. know thousands of buyers compare prices and features on a platform all competing against each other forcing you into a race to the bottom and also competition from WOP's own promoted partners such as Amang Gazi's products.
Now because Amang Gazi is a shareholder in this company, he is going to take your data, take all of the traffic on that platform and promote his own products and put his products and services above yours. So he will take the lion share because he can manipulate the platform to benefit himself, his products, but also his friends and the people that he works with, the companies that he's invested in. He's going to be pushing those products and services on the what platform and burying all of the other creators.
My biggest thing about this is that as a creator, you need to really focus on your own business and focus on what you need to do to make your business grow and for you to make money in the long term. But on a platform like this, the competitive nature of this platform, this can often make creators feel shitty because they're looking at creators making 10, 20, $30,000 per month. It will make them feel worthless and it will make them feel like they're not good enough.
And it will actually make them quit because it's giving them unrealistic expectations that only a small percent of creators will ever actually achieve. 99% of creators will never get to the top of the leaderboard on 99% of creators will never make 20, 30K a month. 99% of creators will never get flown out to the WP headquarters.
They will never get special treatment. They will never be treated with the respect that the tiny percentage of creators on WP actually get. So for this reason again, I think a platform like W is bad for creators.
It will force you into the comparison trap. It will make you feel worthless. It will make you start secondguessing yourself and it will throw you off track and ultimately it will just stop you from progressing in your own creator business.
Number five, unnecessary fees. Now, as an online creator, you have to pay some sort of fees to different platforms. If it's Gumroad, if it's Stripe, whatever platform you're on, you do have to pay small fees.
But WAP actually charges 3. 9% and also 30 cents for every transaction. Now, as a creator, you probably already have a Stripe account, which charges 2.
9% transaction fees. So, if you have a W account as well, this means that you will lose 6. 9% of your revenue just in fees.
Just for example, my target for this year is to make $100,000 from digital products. Using Stripe is going to cost me about $2,900 in fees. If I use the W platform as well, this is going to cost me an extra $3.
9% which means I would lose close to 7% in fees and pay out $7,000 in fees as opposed to just paying 2. 9% to Stripe and building my own sales page. As a small creator, you want to minimize fees.
Now with the what platform essentially this means you are paying the platform to be a marketing slave for the platform drive traffic to the platform and giving all of your data to the platform and paying them at the same time for all of this. So again I think it makes absolutely zero sense to be on the what platform and this is the reason that I don't like it. Now this is exactly why having your own funnel your own discord and your own sales system is so powerful.
This means no middleman, no algorithms, no hidden fees, just direct connection and control of your audience. Now, the bottom line, WAP is convenient for beginners, but it's a short-term play that cost you ownership of your data and audience, adds unnecessary fees, 6. 9% as opposed to 3%.
It forces you to compete in a saturated marketplace, and it leaves you vulnerable to platform changes. Instead of being an algorithm slave and a marketing slave for another platform, the best thing that you can do is create your own creator funnel for total control. And this is something that I call the four-step creator funnel.
Step one is to attract with content YouTube and Instagram organic and paid ads. Now, the first thing you want to do is get attention by posting your own content. This builds your personal brand and it also builds you a reputation within your industry.
So when people see you, they know exactly who you are. As opposed to being on the W platform, having the W brand and the WAP logo connected to you. You're actually building your own brand as opposed to building the W brand or somebody else's brand.
The second step in this funnel is to capture that attention with free value. Again, instead of capturing attention for the W platform and giving them your email list, you can capture that attention for yourself and build your email list by giving away a free lead magnet to your audience. Step three, nurture with emails, stories, and value.
After you've captured attention and captured leads, then you nurture these leads with emails and stories and value. And again, this is allowing you to build your personal brand and building a direct relationship with your audience as opposed to building that relationship with the users on the W platform. If you do it on the W platform, it's not actually your audience because WAP owns it.
And if the W platform disappears, so does your relationship with your audience. So this is why it's best to nurture your own audience by building your email list, sharing stories, and sharing value so you can have a direct relationship with the audience. Step number four, convert sales with basic landing page and a Discord community.
So you've attracted attention with content. You've captured the attention and built your email list. You've nurtured that email list, and then you've converted it to sales with a basic landing page and a Discord community.
And this is all you need to literally build an audience, take full ownership of that audience, and monetize that audience and generate sales on autopilot. And this is what I advise creators to do. Focus on this four-step creator funnel so you can take total control instead of relying on platforms like WAP, being a marketing slave for the platform, being a slave to the algorithm of that platform, and basically being exploited for your data and your email lists, which does absolutely zero for your personal brand and your creator business.
But anyway, give me your thoughts in the comments, guys. What you think about and a Mangadzi and is this a good look or a bad look for creators? And will you be selling on this platform or will you be one of the creators that takes full control of your audience and actually builds your own salesunnel and does it by yourself?
But anyway, that's going to wrap it up for this video, guys. If you enjoyed the content, consider subscribing and I'll see you in the next one. Peace out.
