PNG – PONG:
An Insider’s Look For Smart Internet Shoppers, Or
Why I May Appear To Be Vanishing
by Kenton Knepper

(Names have been eliminated and changed to protect the guilty)

I kept saying it was going to happen, and now it has.

For years I got nasty letters telling me I should allow others to sell my hard work for cheap or distribute it for free.

I said that if this continued, real creators and performers would have to stop selling their hard work – they wouldn’t be able to afford to continue giving their material away for little or no profit. They had bills to pay too.

Someone had to pay for the hard work in some way – creators could not continue and remain unpaid.

One day, I predicted, creators would start to disappear from view and a new bunch of fake creators would take their place. I said the people who spent their money trying to be frugal would end up causing more costs, worse material, and getting taken in the end.

One day, said I, the real work would be gone due to the “out Wal-Marting” in Internet shops, and real dealers and creators would simply turn away in disgust or vanish entirely.

In the place of real creators would soon be people who wrote great advertising copy, had flashy printing, put cool looking stuff on youtube, and sold material that was ultimately absolute and utter bull. Impractical, not performable, silly and absurd ideas would be passed off as “the real work.” So-called “Smart shoppers” would pay hundreds or thousands for loads of junk, because they wanted not to pay the real creators in magic and mentalism their fair share.

Because of all of this, I predicted, people who were passionate about the real work would either stop selling their work to just anyone, or they would disappear entirely.

Then I would mention guys like John Cornelius. Good luck finding that brilliant mind, I said.

I knew it was coming. Others scoffed.

Then the other day I got an email that talked about how they could get things cheaper from a dubious Internet dealer rather than support our website directly. We’ll call the company in question PNG – just so I am not exposing anyone to any harm – not even the dubious dealer.

Here are the facts, as I know them.

As far as PNG is concerned, I had to call them personally a few months back for putting out a trick as there own that was nearly identical to one I had put out years before. They agreed to give me credit later on, after the fact. Naturally they got the profit off of it just the same.

Yep, they have the right to undercut everyone until every bit of their competition goes away. That includes my company Wonder Wizards. PNG isn’t the only dealer trying to undercut us either.

Yes, you may get some things cheaper from certain discount dealers. That’s fine.

Most legitimate dealers on the other hand insist they will not buy or sell my work at all if Wonder Wizards discounts my products online.

That puts Wonder Wizards and me in quite a bind.

Now, this is my original work, but everyone else can make money off of it except our company and me?

What do we do?

We make special deals, packages, free gifts and online things available instead.

It stings a bit when we get emails about how I ought to sink to the level of the dubious discounter. It hurts because we’re doing everything we can to make our direct customers happy to support the original work, so that it may continue.

To help make direct support even better for our customers, we offer packages and DVD deals galore. If you are on our email list, you get free tricks and writings from me, and you’ll get new discounts and coupons this next year too.

But most of all, we will be offering new material by me
to our direct customers only from now on.

The only way I can afford to put anything out at this point is if we do so directly, due to this constant undercutting of my own work.

So PNG and others will not have access to all of my work in the near future.
That’s how far this has gone.

Many people have made themselves into “dealers” so they can buy things on the cheap. I understand that. The trouble is, that this made prices actually go higher, because creators learned what their hard work was really selling for to most of the actual market.

More than that, it made the quality of the material being sold go way down. Only poor creators wanted to sell their “ideas” so cheap. What did it matter to them? They had come up with a thought after a few beers or rounds of coffee, and that was enough to warrant going straight to market with it.

Soon every newbie performer became a “creator” who was selling to each other, and the pros only occasionally could sell the real work – because it wasn’t the flash-cut advertising trying to make up for lousy and impractical material everyone else was buying. Sure the products by the novices are often horrible, but damn, they sure looked good on youtube before you learned how ridiculous it was to try and really perform their ideas. Some of these “creators” claimed to be doing the trick longer than their actual age.

Now here’s an open secret about Wal-Mart that the “Wal-Marters of Magic” don’t want you to know. They can’t undersell everything either. They have to make up the costs elsewhere. So while they sell popular products and the big names cheap, they will also produce pieces of junk and sell them for hundreds of times what the item it worth. How? It looks good on the Internet, that’s how!

Too bad you won’t be performing on the Internet with everything set up just as they have it set up for their cameras online. If you did, the trick might look decent when you tried to do it too.

Unfortunately, you exist not in cyberspace, but in real life. At least some of the time. And in real life, a lot of these tricks and their ignorant methods blow. Oh well, you’ll always have your online video imagining of how the trick could look – if only you could perform it online (or on television) only.

In the end then, you’re not really being the smart shopper you hope to be. These sneaky dealers both slowly raise their prices on items you do not notice, and then add in other items that are drastically over priced to make up for their lack of good material and “low, low, low prices!”

Right now PNG is advertising a really dangerous effect. It sure looks great on youtube though. Pros have written PNG to tell them that their selling of this effect will hurt real pros, and the audiences of inexperienced performers too. You’ll need an army of lawyers if you even try to do this trick on a friend.

But frankly, PNG doesn’t care about you – that’s your problem. Worse still, they don’t even take responsibility for producing and popularizing the product.

PNG is advertising their new video all over the place. It’s the best thing anyone could buy! But what does PNG secretly say behind the scenes? I’ll tell you, because I know.

PNG says that any lawsuits will have to be directed at the people who actually made the DVD and those who perform what the DVD teaches. PNG says (paraphrasing):

“This video isn’t ours. We’re not taking responsibility for it. Hell, it isn’t really even our video. We’re just buying it from the people who are making the video. Oh, and we’re only buying one DVD of it at a time, like we do on all the stuff we sell. We don’t bother keeping stock. We buy and sell onesies only. So this really isn’t our problem.”

PNG bills themselves as one of the worlds largest and best “magic dealers” on the Internet, but they don’t keep anything in stock? What then do they do?

They wait for you to buy something from them. Then they take your money and go out and buy it and send it to you. How professional. You could do that yourself. Just be a dealer. Thousands of others have done that.

So what? Well, behind the scenes, PNG are selling things like this DVD that has not even been filmed yet.

Maybe you’re still not upset about PNG’s tactics. I don’t have anything against them personally. They have the right to get by with as much as they can, I suppose.

But you as a customer and an intelligent online buyer ought to know the real situation – not just what they show you with Internet flash and spin.

Your support of the kind of places PNG represents is tearing down magic and mentalism.

Creators are starting to sell to direct to customers only while other creators sell to a handful of very select shops only.

I have been saying that would happen for years. Then true brilliant people like John Cornelius just up and quit. He took his ingenious thoughts with him, and applied them elsewhere – where they paid him in kind.

Now, I am joining the ranks of John Cornelius and those before me. I don’t claim to be as creative or as brilliant as anyone else. But at last the “out Wal-Marting of Magic” has caught up to me too.

I am hoping that you come back to WonderWizards.com for new exclusive future releases and discounts going online that others do not have. I have a new blog there now too, and soon downloadable MP3s and more are being made available... that you can’t get anywhere else.

I know this economy is hurting everyone. I want to help our customers get what they need at a great price. I want to be able to provide real creativity and material that has been tested in real life situations, as well as make true advancements in our arts.

I am hoping Wonder Wizards will be able to continue to be an outlet for my work in this way.

Some of my work I have decided I will no longer put into print, DVD or teach in lectures, but rather only instruct in serious seminars due to this situation.

Other material I will keep for sale initially or solely at Wonder Wizards and our related websites.

Wonder Wizards has already decided to potentially limit much of my material to a few select dealers from now on. It may be indefinitely.

So that’s the situation as it really is, behind the scenes. Take a hint from these few hints. Some of us do know what’s really happening.

Save money, yes. Just be sure you know to whom your money is really going. Your support determines the products to come. Your purchase anywhere is your vote for that person and their shops’ ethics.

Your lack of purchase means the demise of the same. Don’t let their illusions fool you.

I hope now that you can be the intelligent Internet shopper you wish to be.

If you want to continue to buy from the likes of PNG, go right ahead. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Again.

See you at www.wonderwizards.com

(Note: PNG is not the real name of the company in question, nor does any single company alone represent the problem situation in its entirety. Where you spend your money is the determining factor. Vote for creativity, or con. It’s your choice.)

Kenton