So after 3 months of using the Agloco toolbar I’ve finally called time on it. It’s either not adding my hours correctly, not showing any adverts, not letting me login or on occasion all three!
What Is Agloco?
Agloco stands for A Global Community and was supposed to be a way of rewarding people for surfing the internet. A Global Community, sounds like a load of hippy crap right? The way it actually was supposed to work was that you earn “shares” in the company by using their toolbar and then any profit the company makes is split amongst the shareholders. Whilst the ins and outs were always a little fuzzy (at best) it was free so you had nothing to lose.
Bye Bye Agloco
Although I haven’t lost anything over the last 3 months, apart from maybe a small portion of the bottom of my desktop (on the rare occasions the toolbar has worked) I have finally lost my patience. How can the toolbar be generating revenue if it’s not working, not serving ads or not letting people sign in? If it’s not earning money then this company should be due to turn a profit some time around the year………never. Even when it has worked my credited hours are all over the place. Maybe it’s just me and my dodgy PC(s)? Maybe not, 95% of my referrals don’t use the toolbar each month, those who I speak to have uninstalled it for exactly the same reasons I have i.e. it doesn’t work.
Personally I would have thought that having a nailed down toolbar generating revenue would have been the key to this business idea. My own opinion as well is that it wouldn’t be that hard to achieve, not that I know much about integrating desktop and web based technologies. If it were me I’d probably just embed a simple browser component inside a form and then rely on some sort of 3rd party ad serving technology to display text ads inside that window. There is nothing to opening the ad destination URI in the default browser. Either that or a nice xml web service to serve the ads if the ad partner can facilitate it. For the hours a quick look at the process list will reveal if a browser is currently running and you can look at its window handle to see if it’s visible, get the browser URI, retrieve and strip text and you can see the interests of the viewer. It’s then just a case of reporting via a very simple xml web service. You’ll need some load balancing at the server end but no biggy. That’s just me, there’s no way a business would base everything on something as simple as that. Whatever they have done though appears to be very much hit and miss. I’d suggest if your business has one way of making money then you make sure that one way works!
To show how bad it’s got I’m not even including an Agloco referral link in this post, now that’s a serious state of affairs.
2 Responses to “Bye Bye Agloco”
Shypy
September 16, 2007
I uninstalled the toolbar the day I downloaed it, because it didnt have any ads to show. Now I’m no finance guru, but I realize it when an idea is not going to work.
Nice blog, added you to my reader
|Paul B
September 16, 2007
From what I’ve been reading recently from some big name bloggers it looks as though their whole business plan is starting to look screwed. Not to mention that nearly 12 months in and they still haven’t paid out a penny!
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