Vanity Publishers

In 2025, I think most millennials are familiar with the art of scamming. We grew up with dial‑up, chain emails, “your car’s extended warranty” voicemails, and that one cousin who swears their crypto coin is totally legit. Scammers have a variety of mediums these days. There's the outright scams, you fork over money for something that doesn't exist. Sometimes they try to steal your financial information hoping to commit fraud (joke's on them if they try to steal non existent money from my bank accounts). There are those scams where they try to get you to unknowingly commit check fraud for their benefit. Then there's the scams where you do actually receive something, but it's not anywhere near the quality promised. Sometimes these scam items are vitamins that offer little to no benefit beyond typical OTC medications for twelve times the price, sometimes it's a cheap Chinese knock off item that breaks after one use. One particular scam that tickled my funny bone was when a woman bought what she assumed was regular furniture at an unbelievable price point only for it to be incredibly expensive doll furniture.

But since the rise of the internet and digital publications, I've seen a new kind of scam. It’s slipperier. It dresses in business-casual. I call it scam-adjacent because these companies do actually offer you something for free, but the free item is bait. What they really want is to aggressively market scams to you and hope you fall for them. Almost like a bait and switch. If you have the discernment to take the free item and refuse their "offers," it really only costs you your time. Maybe a bit of pride. But I also think one can take these free items and use them to their advantage.

What am I talking about? Those companies that publish digital articles or lists with you in them. An aggregate of online data. The truth is it will only ever amount to a google search hit. For some people that means nothing, but for some people it can be mildly beneficial if you're trying to curate a digital footprint. They scrape a bit of your LinkedIn information, toss in a few softball interview questions, and voilà: “Top 100 Visionaries in a Niche So Specific It’s Basically Just You and a Labrador.”

I have personally worked with three scam-adjacent companies and haven't lost a single dollar to them. I filled out the written interview questions and got a free article written about myself. For a no one like me with minimal accomplishments, it's neat. It's a bit of faux-authority online. I get to blabber on using it as free advertising for myself and I don't shell out a dime. I make it work in my favor. That’s the key difference with scam-adjacent stuff: they’re counting on your vanity to do their billing for them. If you don’t pay, they’ll nag. If you do pay, they’ll sprint.

And I can't ignore how many people have felt steep remorse after realizing they just paid $1000 for a plaque that means absolutely nothing to anyone but them. It's basically a vanity test, are you willing to pay money so people think you're impressive. One would think someone like me would be a great mark, I've hated myself for most of my life so you'd think I'd be willing to pay for external validation. And maybe if I wasn't always broke I'd have fallen for it once or twice. But I think mostly it's just that I don't care if people find me impressive. I'm realistic enough to know that I'm not. At least not by society's standards. I went to community college for an art degree that means literally nothing to anyone hiring. I know that what is genuinely impressive about me are things society doesn't actually celebrate or reward financially. I have resilience and discernment. I lived a few life time's worth of trauma and came out the other side as a semi reasonable person. That's my accomplishment, having not killed myself before the age of 30. They don't really give you trophies or money for that.

That’s the tension these companies exploit, though, the gap between how we measure worth and how the internet measures clicks and likes. They promise prestige but sell product bundles. They dangle “exposure” but invoice “exposure package premium.” Meanwhile, the actual deliverable is a link that lives on a website no one reads unless you send them there yourself. Which, to be fair, is sometimes enough. If you need a little breadcrumb trail for clients, a bio page you didn’t have to design, or a place to park a headshot where your eyes don’t look like they’ve seen the abyss, the free version can be…fine.

So am I a sucker for spending my time and energy answering interview questions for my tiny corner of the vast void of the internet? Some might say I am, but I personally think I got one over on the scammers. They're giving me free advertising space online. Maybe even indefinitely. And though they're only found by clicking my very specific hyperlink, it's still a link I can post on my small social media pages to give a semblance of legitimacy. I recognize it as meaningless external validation. The digital magazines and websites aren't the cover of Forbes and I think as long as you go into these situations with your eyes open and your wallet firmly closed, they aren't really a scam. But for the humans with more fragile egos who rely on others commending them, they can quickly turn into a scam. Unless you think a printed out version of a digital article is worth $300, then I guess no harm no foul.

If anything, these experiences have taught me two things. First, the internet will happily monetize any human feeling: ambition, insecurity, even curiosity, if you let it. Second, you can still use that machine for your own little guerilla PR, so long as you know what you’re getting, a searchable blip, not a coronation. So in my humble little opinion, take the free link, skip the plaque, keep your money, and save your applause for the stuff that’s actually hard to do. Like surviving life's hardships, healing childhood trauma, creating things for the sake of the act itself (even if you're bad at it), and becoming a decent human despite everything you've seen. No monetary exchange required.