The AGLOCO Bubble Bursts

For fans of the AGLOCO scam that have been touting it as an easy way to lavish riches, it must have been heartbreaking when they received this email earlier this week:

Dear Member,

    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

My only question is: who is actually surprised by this?

The whole idea behind AGLOCO is that you get paid for surfing the web, and for recruiting other people to surf the web. In return for looking at ads, you get some of the advertising revenue. Sounds easy, doesn't it? But you know what they say—if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

The concept started with AllAdvantage back in 1999. Many people liked the idea, but it didn't work. AllAdvantage went out of business less than two years later.

Then in 2006, some of the guys from AllAdvantage decided to try again, calling it AGLOCO this time (AGLOCO means A Global Company). In theory, they should have done a better job the second time around. Instead, it went out of business in just over a year, without paying out a single penny.

But this really wasn't surprising. Unlike AllAdvantage, AGLOCO said they would pay their members mainly in stock, not cash. While that would let them survive longer, the stock would never be worth anything unless the company went public. They also spent many months trying to build their membership before they even released their Viewbar. The Viewbar is the program that shows the ads at the bottom of your screen, so no Viewbar means no revenue.

When the Viewbar finally did come out, it was one of the worst pieces of software in history. It crashed an awful lot, and it had weird bugs like letting you choose a search engine from a list, then using the search engine below the one you chose. For some people, it didn't even show ads, thereby defeating its purpose.

The worst part was that communication from the AGLOCO team was almost nonexistent. Members were complaining about not having any idea what was going on, and still no updates came from the bigwigs. Eventually they released a statement basically saying "sorry, we were really busy, but here are a few updates."

When members tried to log in and got a warning that the security certificate had expired, that was when even the most devout believers started to have doubts. A security certificate is a trivial expense for a company that's supposed to pay out millions and millions of dollars to its members. The sayonara email came out a few weeks later.

And let's not forget that the whole business model was dependent on your ability to enroll lots of people in the program. Even if AGLOCO had done what they planned to do, you still would make practically nothing if you had no one in your network. Just about the only person to make the big money would have been John Chow, with his 2,023 direct referrals and 29,668 people in his entire network. Do you think you could do even 1% of that?

So long, AGLOCO (and AllAdvantage). May it be at least a few more years before your next reincarnation.