I am struggling to understand why someone would make and publish these fakes. It took some effort, not much due to AI, but some human intervention was necessary. So, my question is about the profit, how can someone make money by making these fakes, is it just for fun?
RTRanger
Advanced Member
They make money by you clicking on it!
Not from me they don't. In all my years of spending way too much time online, I have never once clicked on an ad. lol
But it clearly works as they keep doing it.
A friend sent me this Mercedes camper link so I thought OK, Mercedes is following VW Westfalia steps of seventies. Once I looked at a galley on the right side of the front passenger seat, I realized it was a fake. Once I clicked on this link other link showed up, difficult life in this AI generated alternative universe. I will learn how to recognize fake by its front video picture without clicking, but unfortunately these fakes will likely become more believable in the future.
Bud-ClassB
Senior Member
Click Bate is on Every Page of the internet. There are 894,838,497,008,849,075,000.004 pages. Someone did the math. It works.
Interesting, there is going to be a point when clickbait saturation will undermine usefulness of u-tube or other media to the point of total rejection. For me a personal example is my distrust to TV quasi news, I don’t recall when I last time looked at TV news.
Back to the RV world, having a camper designed and manufactured by van manufacturers folks could be good for us, consumers.
Clickbate may actually lead to downfall of many different parts of the internet.
Websites aren't charity operations and need income to survive, and advertising is the main way to do it right now. The pricing model is the problem, I think, as they pay for for number of clicks on the link, and not on the sales that come from the contact. This encourages the ad folks to put the doofy looking guy, or the women in the two sizes too small T shirt in the link pitch. Until the model changes to be actual sales benefits, this will continue, I think. Temu is absolutely the worst for this. None of their links go to the interesting looking product in the link bait.
I like the idea of a consumer driven class b design, but I don't think it can be a finished product type adventure initially because of the large costs involved and the fact the contributors are going to be spread out all over the country. How do you build vans when all you manufacturing gurus are not in the factory, for instance.
What I could see working would be for IT geeks to put together a design package tailored to class b van design, which really is pretty basic in the big picture of manufacturing processes. Put online it could be clearing house for all the "what if" dreamers that we all are, the designers that would have decide if any of it worked and if it could work together, and the manufacturing types that would be able to determine if it could be actually built for a price that would make viable. The good is that if everyone did manage to come up with a few innovative and popular designs, finding existing small builders would probably not be horribly difficult if they got enough help and were willing to accept it.
Interesting idea, but most of the talent that would be available to do it and can afford the time to do it, are already retired like many of us here. This could make it unrealistic to do any of it beyond the design concepts.
Growth of DIY conversions in recent years is an example of customer level of dissatisfaction with currently available camper vans in NA. I am an example, in 2013 because I couldn’t find anything which would making me to open my wallet so I went that route. Having positive experience of buying our first two camper vans directly from VW could have made my desires too high.
Somehow VW/Westfalia was able to pull it off a half a century ago. Life is different today, but did camping change so much since than that vans manufacturers can’t pull it anymore. I agree that experience in the design phase is critical, and folks with experience are often retired.
Our current camper van builders are very fast in some areas, but act as snails in other. They are very quick in changing prices upwards, paying a half million USD for a van is (pick a word). But copying DIY folks is slow, an example is Thinsulate, it started in DIY community in 2013, Winnebago just announced their new insulation technology this year – Thinsulate.
One question that keeps coming up for me is where the "new" generation of campers stand on all of the design and use stuff and what percent of them would have the skills needed to build a DIY camper with the reduction in skilled trade work that has been going on for years.
It is probable that as a group they are spread out over many generations so lots of age variations, but with the constant of being new to camping and being on the road.
We have had our Roadtrek 190P for 18 years and have modded it to fit our use patterns over time, but how we use the van is substantially different than what we envisioned originally as "new campers". I think most of us here have gone though all that.
I have no idea how the market is split between experienced campers that are getting a newer van or van that suits them better, and the new campers who probably don't really know what the need (even if they think so).
From what I see in new class b vans, there seems to be a definite trend to toward showing at the expense many times of practicality. It also runs up the cost, which we all have certainly seen. I would relate it to the trend that has happened with pickup trucks, which now appear to be status vehicles and most aren't needed to do the common pickup needed functions like hauling stuff. I have a great time at the local home centers watching as I slide 8' long boards in my 96 Buick Roadmaster wagon and shut the tailgate, while the guy with $80K pickup next to me has 6' boards leaning on the tailgate because the box is only 5.5' long for instance.
Numerous companies, like the old Roadtrek tried selling basic vans at lower prices and they weren't available for long. Was it poor design, quality or something else I don't know, but I think it is likely that the new buyers got impressed by all the features and flash of the fancier, higher cost, vans so the plain ones didn't sell well.
I think all of us that have been around the campers for a while can imagine the often less the ethical RV sales types telling a newbie how the fully centralized system with take care of everything and in every situation perfectly, and those systems don't come inexpensively. It also puts the camper into the area we have discussed several times that can ruin trips quickly, the possibility of a single component making the camper useless, the repair time a very long wait, and the cost of the repair excessive.
For us, finding a new class b now would be very difficult as we don't need or want flashy, will prioritize storage, convenience and utility over wide open to keep the overall length reasonable and other items related to redundancy of systems and ease of repair at reasonable cost.
DIY would solve this stuff for us, but I don't really think I want to commit the time (many months) and physical body abuse to doing one. Buying a fully custom van and having it built is very, very expensive if you also want good components and configurations that aren't common. $500K seems to be easy to hit this days going that way and the wait can be years.
One thing that I do worry about in regards to the DIY stuff, both as a full new van and as a modified standard class b, is the availability of quality, reliable, components to do the work. I think we are already seeing some of the reduction in the electrical power system things. When our Magnum shore charger died last year, I had a very hard time finding a standalone inverter/charger of high quality and with the capabilities we needed. If we still had the AGM batteries in place, I would not have been able to find anything except a Victron multicomponent setup to do it because of the shunt controlled charging we were doing with the AGM. With lithium I was able to switch to volt and state of charge control so get by with our new Samlex, but it also has a weakness with no remote voltage sense and that makes it less capable. I hope Victron gets more DIY friendly in their policies, though, as it would make options more readily understandable and doable, both for fully automatic and individual components. The ability now with Bluetooth in Victron products makes at least phone control of them appear possible without all the programming to do their controller panels and integration. They may be the only ones still available in high end stuff pretty soon, unless some other brands moves into that level, that isn't fully centralized.
Of course, a bright side for DIY folks might be in the future some really nice class b campers might be available with failed centralized contolled power systems in them that are either too expensive to fix or the parts are no longer available. We do see that happening on the older Roadtrek Ecotrec systems now I think with people updating to DIY power systems in them.
It is probable that as a group they are spread out over many generations so lots of age variations, but with the constant of being new to camping and being on the road.
We have had our Roadtrek 190P for 18 years and have modded it to fit our use patterns over time, but how we use the van is substantially different than what we envisioned originally as "new campers". I think most of us here have gone though all that.
I have no idea how the market is split between experienced campers that are getting a newer van or van that suits them better, and the new campers who probably don't really know what the need (even if they think so).
From what I see in new class b vans, there seems to be a definite trend to toward showing at the expense many times of practicality. It also runs up the cost, which we all have certainly seen. I would relate it to the trend that has happened with pickup trucks, which now appear to be status vehicles and most aren't needed to do the common pickup needed functions like hauling stuff. I have a great time at the local home centers watching as I slide 8' long boards in my 96 Buick Roadmaster wagon and shut the tailgate, while the guy with $80K pickup next to me has 6' boards leaning on the tailgate because the box is only 5.5' long for instance.
Numerous companies, like the old Roadtrek tried selling basic vans at lower prices and they weren't available for long. Was it poor design, quality or something else I don't know, but I think it is likely that the new buyers got impressed by all the features and flash of the fancier, higher cost, vans so the plain ones didn't sell well.
I think all of us that have been around the campers for a while can imagine the often less the ethical RV sales types telling a newbie how the fully centralized system with take care of everything and in every situation perfectly, and those systems don't come inexpensively. It also puts the camper into the area we have discussed several times that can ruin trips quickly, the possibility of a single component making the camper useless, the repair time a very long wait, and the cost of the repair excessive.
For us, finding a new class b now would be very difficult as we don't need or want flashy, will prioritize storage, convenience and utility over wide open to keep the overall length reasonable and other items related to redundancy of systems and ease of repair at reasonable cost.
DIY would solve this stuff for us, but I don't really think I want to commit the time (many months) and physical body abuse to doing one. Buying a fully custom van and having it built is very, very expensive if you also want good components and configurations that aren't common. $500K seems to be easy to hit this days going that way and the wait can be years.
One thing that I do worry about in regards to the DIY stuff, both as a full new van and as a modified standard class b, is the availability of quality, reliable, components to do the work. I think we are already seeing some of the reduction in the electrical power system things. When our Magnum shore charger died last year, I had a very hard time finding a standalone inverter/charger of high quality and with the capabilities we needed. If we still had the AGM batteries in place, I would not have been able to find anything except a Victron multicomponent setup to do it because of the shunt controlled charging we were doing with the AGM. With lithium I was able to switch to volt and state of charge control so get by with our new Samlex, but it also has a weakness with no remote voltage sense and that makes it less capable. I hope Victron gets more DIY friendly in their policies, though, as it would make options more readily understandable and doable, both for fully automatic and individual components. The ability now with Bluetooth in Victron products makes at least phone control of them appear possible without all the programming to do their controller panels and integration. They may be the only ones still available in high end stuff pretty soon, unless some other brands moves into that level, that isn't fully centralized.
Of course, a bright side for DIY folks might be in the future some really nice class b campers might be available with failed centralized contolled power systems in them that are either too expensive to fix or the parts are no longer available. We do see that happening on the older Roadtrek Ecotrec systems now I think with people updating to DIY power systems in them.
Try RV LIFE Pro Free for 7 Days
- Ad-Free experience on this RV LIFE Community.
- Plan the best RV Safe travel with RV LIFE Trip Wizard.
- Navigate with our RV Safe GPS mobile app.
- and much more...
