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Agloco is now dead, gone, kaput. I bet all those people that really pushed it hard are feeling a bit stupid today. Not as stupid as the doom merchants claiming that WidgetBucks will be the next to go! Agloco was based on a single idea (viewbar), executed badly that never had any real way of generating an income. WidgetBucks is based on a very stable business model that works well (if not slowly for the creators) and also has enough backing (Mpire) for the development to be done correctly. It’s like comparing chalk and cheese.

The truth is that the doom merchants are bloggers, relying solely on blogs for their income. As has been said a hundred times before WidgetBucks ads DO NOT work well on blogs. They require decent amounts of product targeted search engine traffic which does not mix nicely with general blogging, no matter how specific you think you are being. The Blogosphere is not the internet, it is not the world wide web, it is only a tiny part of it. I have Adsense ads on here because they will generate an income on even the least untargeted websites, even if it’s just from affiliates bidding 2 and 3 cents. This website is not how I make my living. In general real money on the internet is made in 1 of 3 ways:-

1. Content websites
2. PPC Affiliate Marketing
3. Mail list marketing

I was watching a TV program on Sunday morning and it had a famous ballroom dancer being interviewed on it. One of the presenters asked “but ballroom dancing has only become popular recently, only old people used to dance?”. He was totally wrong, there has always been a dancing community, in their own eyes a large one at that. The truth was though that if you weren’t “part” of that community it might as well of not existed. Blogging is the same. My 12 year old daughter doesn’t blog so has no interest in them. My mum and dad don’t so have no interest in blogging but they still use the internet, they will both use Google to search for things to buy. I think we bloggers can sometimes get caught up in our own little worlds, John Chow, Darren Rowse, Jeremy Schoemaker are only truly famous amongst bloggers and people interested in making money in the same way that I’m sure there are plenty of “famous” erotic blog writers out there that I’ve never heard of. Of all the people that visit my blog how many are not bloggers themselves, very few I would guess? Natural search traffic for blogs (the type of people that buy things) is a infamously low percentage compared to other types of website. There are people out there making 10,20,50 times from the internet what the more well known a-listers are making without ever feeling the need to talk about themselves or write a blog, why, because they know blogging doesn’t pay and they don’t need the ego boost. This isn’t supposed to be criticism (hell you are reading MY blog), I’m just pleading with you all to diversify, when you have been introduced to making money online through blogging then it’s natural to think it is the only way. It is these people that will hammer anything that doesn’t work for them on their blogs i.e. WidgetBucks.

WidgetBucks does not work well on general blogs, you will not get the same number of clicks that you see from Adsense. If you have product related content webistes that attract targeted search traffic then WidgetBucks ads can perform very well (I know of one medium sized publisher that has made more than $15,000 in a month with them). If you’re looking for the next idea to go belly up I suggest you look in the direction of BlogRush

Agloco, the get paid for surfing mega plan looks like it might be on its last legs. I don’t sign in to my account very often, maybe once every few months but I just have done to be greeted with a SSL certificate expiry notice. Looks like they haven’t bothered to renew their SSL since the 18th of November. Not paying for things is always the first sign that any business is struggling, I’ve worked for 2 companies that went from great to struggling so the signs tend to be quite obvious* (bills getting ignored, people starting to blame anybody and everybody other than themselves, lots of talk of “if we can do this.. and “if we can get that..”). A quick read of their company blog shows that

1. It’s not been updated in well over a month
2. The last several entries are all about magical “ifs”

I might be completely wrong, it has been known from time to time but my guess would be that the Agloco concept won’t be around much longer. Makes me really glad that I gave up the idea of ever making any money with them months ago.

* Nothing to do with me I must add

I’ve had to break away from Halo 3 to make this official announcement, Agloco as a money maker sucks big time! They have finally got around to announcing how they are going to make payment to their members (or as they like to call them “owners). If you were banking on using this as a way of escaping the day job I’ve got some really bad news for you.

Agloco Payment Distribution

At a first glance the figures don’t actually look that bad, to date the payment amounts are as follows:-

June – $0.48 an hour

July – $0.42 an hour

August – $0.54 an hour

That doesn’t look too bad does it? Except when you realise that each payment is to be spread over the next 10YEARS! Say for example you have no referrals in your network and you did the full 5 hours in June. That means you made $2.40 Spread that over 10 years and it means each month you receive $0.02 a month, woo hoo! During the last 3 months of running Agloco with no referrals (as 85% of current members are doing) you have ensured a grand total of about $0.05 a month, think about inflation and how little your money is going to be worth in10 years time and it just gets worse. Did I mention also that it looks like the minimum payout is going to be $100?

But What If I’ve Got Thousands Of Referrals And Hours

Even if you’ve worked your ass off on promoting Agloco, have spent money and have a substantial active (active is the key, only 1 of my referrals actually uses the toolbar) referral network you’re not going to be making that much. Lets say for example you’re putting 5000 hours in the bank each month, for June you’ve just made $2400, but here’s the kicker, spread that over 10 years and what you actually see is $20 a month. After 3 months you’ll be earning around $60 a month so even with them numbers it’s going to take 3 months before you see any money from Agloco. How many people are going to earn 5000 hours a month, not many I would guess! What’s even worse is that people with larger networks are going to have real trouble holding onto their networks thanks to Aglocos payments news, how many of your referrals are only earning 5 hours a month? How many do you think will carry on using a toolbar that searches via the Ask search service for the princely sum of $0.02 a month? Expect to see the number of active uses in your referral network decrease in the coming weeks, Agloco have taken a good idea and made it bad. You’ll not find any Agloco affiliate links in this post, there is no way that I could recommend Agloco as an online money maker.

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.