Interested to know how successful AGLOCO is and how much money you can make from them?

I’ve got the answer!

AGLOCO, the paid-to-surf pyramid MLM scheme that reportedly shares it’s advertising revenue with users who install an advertising-displaying toolbar on their computer, has finally released it’s Viewbar so we can all finally enjoy even more advertising on our screens!

How big is AGLOCO?

I was interested to know the traffic levels of the AGLOCO website now that the Viewbar has been released to the world so I took at look at it’s Alexa graph. Just for fun, I decided to compare the graph to the blog of popular dot com mogul (and one of AGLOCO’s biggest supporter) John Chow. It was then that I noticed something strange and eerie:

alexa.jpg

The traffic patterns and levels are almost identical! Is John Chow really AGLOCO in disguise? No. Actually, the patterns mimic most larger sites and reflect internet usage. But the level is what is important!

In his May blog summary, John Chow listed his traffic as 187,324 unique visitors for the month of May. That equates to 6,043 uniques per day so we can assume the same traffic level for the AGLOCO site.

Isn’t it kind of small?

The first thing struck me about the traffic was that it was actually kind of small. While it’s great for John Chow, for an internet company that has had months of it’s members promoting the site through forums and websites, I actually think it’s pretty lame. There aren’t many websites devoted to John Chow, but there are thousands devoted to AGLOCO. Given that John Chow writes about his support for AGLOCO, I’m really surprised that they don’t get more traffic.

Perhaps the most interesting part of AGLOCO’s traffic is for the month of May. It distinctly declines while John Chow’s remains at the same level. I’m not sure why this happened. My initial assumption was that people had finally given up on it, but then I remembered that after John Chow’s angry letter to AGLOCO, they sent him a Viewbar and he posted a video of him actually using it. I thought this would actually increase AGLOCO’s traffic but the decline may have been due to his letter or his immortal line during the video of:

“You can also see google ad links at the bottom…right now it’s not relative because…aah, I’m not exactly sure…”

Showing us a resource-chewing Viewbar that does nothing more than display irrelevant Adsense probably wasn’t the best promotion for AGLOCO. But even a fully working Viewbar would probably still be pretty lame to actually use. I doubt I’ll ever read: “Wow! The AGLOCO Viewbar is really useful and improves my internet experience. It has a calculator and a calendar!”

Don’t worry, it happens to lots of guys

In the past two weeks, AGLOCO finally launched the Viewbar and made it available to download. You’d think this would create a massive spike in their traffic level as suckers members received e-mails and went to the site to download it.

The spike created was no more than double their usual traffic in April and definitely no more than 15,000 hits. That’s not surprising when you consider that John Chow has one of the largest AGLOCO networks at 17,000 members - his network probably contains a large percentage of the entire AGLOCO network. He’s said himself that only 20% of these members would be active in seeking referrals, so it’s no surprise that after 6 months of delays, only 15,000 in the entire network would rush to the Viewbar.

This is a long way off from their plans of releasing it in installments of 50,000 per day!

I’ll concede that the traffic will remain higher than usual as members slowly visit the site to download the Viewbar, but it is unrealistic to assume that it will ever be greater than the first day of release.

These numbers are actually only equivalent to making the front page of Digg and it’s pretty surprising that the ad servers weren’t capable of handling the load. Especially when they’d predicted 50,000! That’s a pretty bad omen for the Viewbar and is a shocking result for management!

You’ll have to pay me now

John Chow is the pimp-daddy of blog monetization and he can quote me on that. In May, the earnings from his blog alone were $10,559. If there’s a way to monetize the blog - he’ll do it and he’ll make a fortune from it. He’s even gone so far as to charge people $10 to remove the ‘no follow’ tag from their comments. Evil genius.

It’s a big assumption, but I have to assume that if AGLOCO has the same reach and traffic levels of John Chow, they have the same income potential. They are both effectively designed to make money from advertising and when compared to other popular site incomes, John Chow’s ‘income vs traffic’ is on par with these sites.

So, 15,000 Viewbar users and an estimated monthly income of $10,559 (minus 10% management expense) means that right now every AGLOCO user receives a gigantic monthly average of:


$0.63

Oh boy. Wow. :roll:

You have to feel sorry for those who built websites and bought Adwords campaigns, don’t you?

Will you call me in the morning?

A lot of assumptions have been made here, but I’m quite confident that the numbers are an accurate reflection of the current state of affairs with AGLOCO. To answer some Frequent Responses to these type of posts:

AGLOCO is a growing network that will get larger and more profitable as more members join!

How long do they need? They’ve had six months of promoting the site and they’re not planning on paying members for months to come. They should have been able to sign up all the advertisers they want right now just based on their predicted member numbers. How many more people will join if they’re not paying and all the Viewbar essentially offers is more ads?

You can’t compare a blog to AGLOCO! And AllAdvantage made millions!

You’re right, but I think it’s a pretty good estimate of how AGLOCO is doing. AllAdvantage went broke and the internet is a different place now. AllAdvantage was one of the first internet advertisers but they’re competing with the Google monopoly now. Just by providing targeted ads this time around isn’t enough. They’re doing no more than what existing ad networks are doing.

It doesn’t cost me anything to try it so I’ll give it a go.

It doesn’t cost you money but you’re giving up a small portion of your screen space, slowing down your computer, giving them your personal information and making yourself more vulnerable to spyware attacks. How much is that all worth?

We can make more money by referring members!

So the only way to really make money is by referring others? And it’s not a pyramid scheme? Ok, assume you’ve got 100 direct referrals and you get 25% of their income. That actually reduces the $0.63 average as you’re cutting the pie into smaller pieces. You’re probably looking at around $3.50 a week. I can’t buy a coffee for that. If you’ve got a larger network you may get a Big Mac value meal.

AGLOCO is a great opportunity to build an online community and I want to finally thank them for this great opportunity to spread peace and love online! I love AGLOCO!

Are you high?