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NancyLebovitz comments on New study on choice blindness in moral positions - Less Wrong
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I'd question "really well". Cult retention rates tend to be really low -- about 2% for Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church ("Moonies") over three to five years, for example, or somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% for Scientology. The cult methodology seems to work well in the short term and on vulnerable people, but it seriously lacks staying power: one reason why many cults focus so heavily on recruiting, as they need to recruit massively just to keep up their numbers.
Judging from the statistics here, retention rates for conventional religious conversions are much higher than this (albeit lower than retention rates for those raised in the church).
I guess "really well" is ill-defined, but I do think that both Sun Myung Moon and L. Ron Hubbard could say "It's a living".
You can get a lot out of people in the three to five years before they leave.
Note that the term cult is a worst argument in the world (guilt by association). The neutral term is NRM. Thus to classify something as a cult one should first tick off the "religious" check mark, which requires spirituality, a rather nebulous concept:
If you define cult as an NRM with negative connotations, then you have to agree on what those negatives are, not an easy task.
"NRM" is a term in the sociology of religion. There are many groups that are often thought of as "cultish" in the ordinary-language sense that are not particularly spiritual. Multi-level marketing groups and large group awareness training come to mind.