Andrew Tate and the Affiliate Funnel: How Members Sold the Membership

In 2022, Andrew Tate’s Hustler’s University sold a monthly online membership offering instruction in subjects including copywriting, e-commerce and cryptocurrency. It also ran an affiliate program. As ABC reported at the time, participating members could earn commissions by promoting the course and bringing in new subscribers.

For those affiliates, three roles overlapped: student, customer and distributor. The lesson in online marketing could become an advertisement for the place selling the lesson. A confrontational clip might therefore function as opinion, entertainment and a route to a sale at once. The business acquired something beyond another paying student: a person with a financial reason to make the teacher more visible.

The Customer Became the Distribution Network

The Observer reported guidance favoring “comments and controversy.” For an affiliate, attention had a possible destination outside the video. A viewer could follow the accompanying link, buy membership and generate a commission. The clip attracted the audience; the link connected that audience to a transaction.

Financial incentive distinguishes this activity from ordinary fandom. Fans circulate material because they enjoy it, identify with it or want to discuss it. An affiliate may do all those things while also holding a direct interest in conversion. Someone watching the clip encounters a speaker and an argument; the person posting it may also be evaluating how well it sells.

TikTok’s 2020 explanation of its recommendation system described interaction and viewing signals, including comments, sharing and completion. That makes a controversy commercially interesting without making outrage a guarantee of reach. A rebuttal can give a clip another occasion to circulate, even when its author intends to discredit the speaker. Being widely encountered still says little about whether a claim is true or a course is useful.

The affiliate arrangement added a sales incentive to this circulation. A fan account was not automatically an affiliate account, and a subscriber was not automatically a promoter. Participating members, however, had a commercial reason to keep the material moving. To an outside viewer, their work could resemble a groundswell of independent enthusiasm.

Income and Belonging

The commercial promise of a community meets a social question larger than this particular business. In 2021, the Survey Center on American Life reported that 15 percent of American men said they had no close friends, compared with 3 percent in its 1990 comparison. Among unmarried men who were not in a romantic relationship, the share was one in five.

A Gallup analysis published in 2025, using aggregated 2023 and 2024 data, found that 25 percent of U.S. men aged 15 to 34 felt lonely a lot of the previous day. The corresponding figure for young U.S. women was 18 percent; the median for young men across the OECD countries in the comparison was 15 percent.

A Pew Research Center report published in January 2025, based on fieldwork conducted September 3–15, 2024, complicates a universal account of male isolation. American men and women reported loneliness at broadly similar rates overall, although men were less likely to say they would turn to several parts of their networks for emotional support.

These studies measure different things: close friendships, loneliness during the previous day and broader experiences of connection. None studied Tate’s subscribers. They cannot tell us why an individual bought membership, or turn loneliness into a demonstrated cause of his commercial success. They do make it possible to take the offer of company seriously without treating every customer as helpless or deceived.

A lesson can teach a useful skill; a group can create accountability; encouragement can help someone act. Those possible benefits leave a separate question about the affiliate arrangement. If a member spends time promoting the course, who receives the value of that work, and how much depends on persuading the next person to pay?

The Legal Boundary Around “Pyramid Scheme”

The pyramid comparison moves too easily between a picture of spreading influence and an allegation about unlawful compensation. Paul Harrigan, a digital-marketing expert at the University of Western Australia, told ABC that Tate operated a pyramid of social-media engagement: members reached followers who could reach further followers. Tate had already denied the pyramid characterization. An expert’s comparison is not a regulatory finding.

The Federal Trade Commission’s U.S. guidance on multilevel marketing describes a fact-specific assessment of how an operation works in practice. Relevant factors include compensation, recruitment incentives, marketing representations and participants’ actual experience. Its examples are not an exhaustive checklist. This is nonbinding guidance about a class of businesses, not a ruling on Hustler’s University, and the reporting reviewed here does not establish an illegal-pyramid finding.

A customer can buy education for personal use, and an affiliate can promote a service that has value. The existence of a real product does not by itself settle the legal question. Equally, a commission on a subscription does not by itself settle it in the other direction. What the documented arrangement exposes is a possible confusion between the course’s educational value and its ability to produce its own publicity.

Visibility can become a reason to trust the teacher. A prospective customer may encounter the same face repeatedly and take that familiarity as evidence of authority. Yet a member could help create the repetition because another signup might pay. The promotion then supplies part of the apparent evidence for the product it is promoting.

What the Platform Bans Changed

In August 2022, Meta told NPR that it had banned Tate from Facebook and Instagram for violating policies concerning dangerous individuals and organizations and hate speech. TikTok told NPR that it had permanently banned his account and was continuing to remove violating content. ABC also reported the closure of the Hustler’s University affiliate program that month, while its courses remained available.

Those were changes to particular accounts and a particular commercial arrangement. Removing the speaker’s account does not automatically remove copies already posted by others. Each copy creates a further moderation decision; commentary and reposting can continue through accounts the speaker does not control. That is a limit of account-level removal, not proof that bans necessarily increase a movement’s influence.

Tate’s current subscription business, The Real World, advertises online-business instruction, mentorship and community. Its sales page shows that these themes remain commercially active. It does not establish that the affiliate program documented in 2022 continues unchanged. The old referral mechanism and the current offer have to be examined on their own evidence.

Certainty as a Subscription Benefit

On the Real World sales page inspected on November 10, 2026, conventional employment is presented as a route to stagnation. Searching for advice alone is contrasted with access to instructors and an active community. Buying the subscription becomes a choice between remaining stuck and taking control. These are the seller’s claims, not verified accounts of customer outcomes.

The sales pitch asks the course to deliver a changed life. A course can be judged by what it teaches and whether the learner can use it. A promise of personal transformation invites the customer to judge a much larger part of life through the purchase. If success depends on commitment, disappointment can be interpreted as a failure to commit, leaving the offer itself less exposed to scrutiny. This is a risk in the pitch, not a finding about how every member responds.

Community can have value even when its sales language overreaches. The practical distinction is whether the student develops a skill that remains useful beyond the group. Writing effective copy for an outside client and writing a post that sells access to the course may involve some of the same techniques. They also place the learner in different relationships to the business collecting the subscription.

The affiliate link beneath the 2022 clip makes that difference visible. It offered the member a possible return for bringing another customer to the teacher. The viewer could disagree with the video, enjoy it or pass it on; the business needed only some of that attention to reach the checkout. A program selling the prospect of earning independently had made its own membership one of the products its students could learn to sell.

Sources and Reading

James Purtill, ABC’s original reporting on the affiliate arrangement and platform removals, August 22, 2022; updated October 18, 2022. Includes the interview with Paul Harrigan.

Shanti Das, Observer: affiliate-training report, August 20, 2022.

TikTok, How TikTok recommends videos, June 18, 2020.

Daniel A. Cox, American Men Suffer a Friendship Recession, Survey Center on American Life, July 6, 2021.

Benedict Vigers, Younger Men in the U.S. Among the Loneliest in West, Gallup, May 20, 2025; data from 2023–2024.

Isabel Goddard and Kim Parker, Men, Women and Social Connections, Pew Research Center, January 16, 2025; fieldwork September 3–15, 2024.

Federal Trade Commission, Business Guidance Concerning Multi-Level Marketing, especially questions 2 and 4–7; consulted November 10, 2026.

Shauneen Miranda, NPR’s report of Meta’s and TikTok’s statements, syndicated by WUSF, August 20, 2022.

The Real World’s sales page, inspected November 10, 2026. Used as evidence of the offer’s wording and positioning.