How can you tell if a YouTube trainer is giving good, unbiased fitness advice or not? I get this question all the time and here is an easy way to tell, ask the following key question:
If you follow the trainers advice, do they get richer?
If the answer is yes, then they have a clear conflict of interest and their advice is not to be trusted! If their income depends on you doing what they recommend then their advice is clearly biased and they will be tempted to distort the truth to get more income. Lets take some examples:
- Trainer 1 extolls the virtues of supplements in every video and tells you how great they are. He also gives you a discount code you can enter when you order to save money. The discount code gives the trainer a kickback on every item purchased. This trainer can’t make his Lamborghini payments unless you buy supplements with his discount code, he clearly has a conflict of interest because his need to make his payments is in conflict with his desire to give good fitness advice – guess which wins?
- Trainer 2 makes free fitness videos and has a huge following, he also makes a killing selling his $100 eBook. Again, ask the question. If you follow the advice in his videos does he get richer? If so, then there is a clear conflict of interest because his need to make payments on his mansion is conflicting with his need to provide good fitness information – again, guess which will win. Its very easy to be liked, just tell people what they want to hear! Many folks just use videos as very well disguised advertisements for their products.
- Scooby1961. I get advertising revenue from my YouTube videos, I have always been up front about my income sources. I am an engineer, that is my job and my income but fitness is my passion. Again though, ask the same question. If you follow my fitness advice, do I get richer? No. I get money from ads whether people take my advice or not, therefore, I have no conflict of interest. I am free to provide the best, unbiased, most helpful information I can. My income is dependent upon me providing consistently high quality information. Unlike many internet personal trainers, I didnt get into this for the money (why I started scoobysworkshop). In fact, before YouTube I spent a personal fortune hosting my own videos and paying huge bandwidth charges to help spread my “fitness for all gospel”. The only reason I put my vids on YouTube was because they saved me gobs of money on hosting fees. True story. Back in 2006 YouTube asked me to become a partner, I said OK even though I had no idea at all what it meant. A few months later I got a check which I didnt cash because I thought it was a mistake. The next month, same thing. After the third month, I figured I needed to contact Google and inform them of their mistake. Only then upon looking into what the partner program was did it hit me – they were actually paying me to do what I always had done, to preach that you can get into the best shape of your life without spending a single dime! Not on supplements, not on books, not on gym memberships, not on expensive equipment. Talk about win-win! My goal now is exactly the same as it was back then, to show that fitness, health, and a killer physique is available to ALL regardless of financial means – without buying a single thing other than a cheap used set of weights from craigslist. Nuff said.
The issue is not if the trainer makes money with their videos, the question is if there is a conflict of interest or not! See the difference???