The manosphere is a direct-response business, and it is bidding for your customer

Researchers at the digital safety organisation Reset Tech and the nonprofit Equimundo published a report, "The Grift Economy: How Young Men Are Being Sold Fake Belonging and Fake Wealth Online," arguing that the manosphere has stopped being an ideology and become an economy that sells coaching and body optimisation to Gen Z men ^[1][2]. For anyone whose buyer is an 18-to-25-year-old man, that reframes a discourse story into a competitive one: the sellers already hold the attention, and they are converting it into paid product.

The funnel is legible. Free content promises self-sufficiency, dominance and emotional suppression, according to the report's authors ^[3]. The upsell path in "looksmaxxing" runs from low-risk "softmaxxing" into "hardmaxxing" practices including hormone injections, supplements, peptides and surgery ^[4]. That is an information product feeding a physical-goods business, which is the oldest direct-response structure there is.

The unit economics are unusually good. Fortune reports that the streamer Adin Ross takes hourly streaming revenue of between $30,000 and $50,000 on Kick, a platform in which he also holds an equity stake ^[5]; a representative for Ross did not immediately respond to Fortune's request for comment ^[6]. Other top streamers earn between $1 million and $10 million a year, including from online courses, sponsorships and speaker fees ^[7]. At the low end of that hourly figure, a full million dollars of annual revenue is roughly 33 hours of live streaming ^[8]. Read the other way, even two billion dollars of industry revenue implies about 200 creators operating at the top of that annual range, which tells you the report is describing a long tail, not a handful of names ^[9].

The demand side is a labour-market story. For only the third time in history women outnumber men in the US workforce, likely because fewer young men are entering it ^[10], and more adult men are living with parents and becoming NEETs, not in employment, education or training ^[11]. A study in the Journal of Political Economy found about 70% of the hours young men spent not working were filled with video games and recreational computer use ^[12]. Time-rich, screen-heavy, income-poor: an audience that is cheap to reach and expensive to convert on rational product benefits alone.

Two consequences for operators. First, competitive: your offer sits in the same feed as offers promising status and transformation, and those convert on insecurity rather than on specification. Second, reputational: the report explicitly names advertisers alongside platforms and influencers as the parties "making billions off of young men's insecurities" ^[13]. Buying that audience puts you inside the category the researchers are describing.

Reset Tech's Kristina Wilfore, a co-author, points the blame at algorithmic systems rather than at any single influencer, and warns that dismissing viral trends as goofy misses the "massive infrastructure" behind them ^[14]. She has called for consumer protection and platform accountability ^[15]. David Sasaki of the American Institute for Boys and Men told Fortune that algorithmic fixes would improve online safety beyond men, but pushed for analog community and role models rather than retroactive measures ^[16].

What to watch: whether the EU's Digital Services Act, applied to social media platforms in 2024 with rules on moderation, safety and transparency, produces enforcement that touches supplement and coaching claims ^[17]; whether US consumer-protection agencies follow Wilfore's ask ^[15]; and whether platform-talent equity arrangements of the Kick type draw disclosure scrutiny ^[5].