Two kinds of pushing:
1. If it's a paid advertisement, then they have to disclose that transparently legally. If it's a paid advertisement and the product is bad, then their reputation is on the line and that's the check and balance. Top influencers should be vetting the products they advertise.
2. If it's not a paid advertisement, then it's not different than someone like me with a voice posting on Reddit their opinions.
u/Emotional_Waltz_1438 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
do they do ads? i dont remember ever seeing a traditional ad by codesmith. i have instead seen heavy ads from bootcamps like tripleten, which all look sus and they have millions of views on youtube because they pay for it. most of codesmith's "ads" are word of mouth or people tal
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
This is correct. Codesmith claims to not to ANY display advertising. Although a former employee was configuring Google Ads for them and they log a lot of stuff to various advertisers, they aren't running standard ads.
They put that budget to running free public events and their blog. Those events and posts are marketing. They were run by a marketing director (who was laid off end of last year) and they are bread and butter marketing.
Alumni telling others about Codesmith is also marketing.
At Codesmith, the **community is the product** - **you are the product** (they have almost no actual "code" that runs anything at Codesmith, just a website and a lot of Google Docs and 3rd party services) so you spreading the good word of Codesmith means they succeeded in their product efforts.