AGLOCO Goes Belly-Up
December 14th, 2007
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Image from AGLOCO website (no longer operational)
There has been a lot of speculation lately about whether AGLOCO’s business model is sustainable. Yesterday I received a definitive answer in this email from AGLOCO:
Dear Hunter,
We would like to update you on the status of AGLOCO’s operations. We continue to believe in the AGLOCO concept, but our revenue is currently not sufficient to give Members a meaningful distribution. And though there are increases in membership, the resulting revenue is not enough to support operating costs. As a development team we are unable to continue to use our savings to fund the operations. If any Member would like to pursue continuing the operations of AGLOCO, you may contact us at agloco1@live.com .
We would like to thank every Member for supporting our effort to bring a piece of the Internet directly to the user. We hope that we can find a way to keep the operations going.
AGLOCO Development Team
For those who don’t know, AGLOCO (which stands for A GLObal COmmunity) is a company that intended to pay people for surfing the web. Basically, members installed a viewbar that displayed across the bottom of their screen, showing ads that were contextually matched with the websites they visited. The viewbar also had a built-in Ask.com search button.
AGLOCO hoped to earn advertising revenue from clicks on the viewbar ads and the Ask.com search ads, and pay their members according to how many hours they logged surfing the web with the Viewbar running. Members would receive credit for their own surfing hours, capped at 5 hours per month, plus they would receive credit for hours surfed by people they had referred to AGLOCO (up to 5 levels deep). Payment was to be made not in cash for the most part, but mainly in AGLOCO stock that could theoretically be sold after the company went public.
Many people have called AGLOCO a scam, which is ridiculous because it was free. Others have called it a pyramid scheme, which is also ridiculous (I’ll have to write a post about what a pyramid scheme is to clear this up). I joined because I thought it sounded interesting and I hoped to make a small amount of money, but I referred to it as a “Mickey Mouse biz opp.” I said “I’m not against doing these things if the time investment is minimal, the monetary investment is nil, and you don’t harrass anyone, but it’s very unlikely that you’ll get any significant value out of it.”
The way you would make a lot of money with AGLOCO is if the company went public and you had a huge AGLOCO downline, like John Chow with his network of nearly 30,000 members. I made no attempt to actively promote it and did not sign anyone up. I was just hoping to be paid for my own personal surfing, for which I had logged 5 hours a month for three months.
While many people were expecting AGLOCO to fail, I was suprised that it didn’t even do as well as AllAdvantage. Around the year 2000, AllAdvantage was a company with a similar premise, founded by some of the same people. I was a member for a few months and received a few $15 paychecks each month for my 25 hours of surfing plus my one downline member’s 25 hours of surfing, until they went out of business. I thought the founders of AGLOCO had worked out a better business model, but I guess not.
Here are the clues that AGLOCO wasn’t going to last:
- The website looked incredibly unprofessional. I was a little suspicious of this from the very beginning, although I thought it didn’t necessarily mean anything.
- There was very, very little communication from AGLOCO. People would ponder on their blogs about when the Viewbar would be released, or when AGLOCO would start to give out stock, but AGLOCO didn’t answer. I became much more suspicious then.
- One day when I tried to log in to their website, I got an error message saying that their security certificate had expired. This made me very suspicious, especially when it was still there days later. With so many members logging in to check their accounts, you’d think they’d have reacted faster if they cared.
- When I got the above email saying they were going out of business, I became very suspicious =)
So what does this all mean? Absolutely nothing. I’ll still join the next one in a heartbeat. As long as it’s free and you don’t spend any time promoting it, it’s fun to play along and you might make some money. That’s enough for me.
