AGLOCO: What went wrong?
Nice to meet you all everyone, I'm thrilled that I found these boards because I haven't seen too many places where mlm companies are discussed in detail. I wanted to find out how many people are down with AGLOCO. For those of you that have never heard of the company, AGLOCO was something that was based on another idea from another company that didn't wok out too well. I gave this company a pretty good try but decided with certain conditions I just couldn't hang, and just after I bailed, they folded up shop anyway due to insufficient revenue.
AGLOCO was something like a pay to surf mlm program that made a pretty good start all over the Internet, but was backed by the same team as AllAdvantage which didn't do much for its image since that company took a nose dive. AllAdvantage had a simple idea: pay people for the hours they spend on the Internet through their browser and market it in an mlm package. What actually ended up happening was an onslaught of what they call "bots" and for all of you that aren't familiar with the term, a bot is a program that can pretend to chat, it can be programmed to surf the Internet, and do any number of tasks on a computer. This had a major impact on the entire program as well as the user-base. It didn't take long for the bots to be detected, and ever newer, more advanced ones to appear.
AGLOCO had a similar concept.
You sign up for the program and install the AGLOCO tool bar which around the time I joined wasn't available yet. You start your browser while the tool bar is running and presumably get your online surfing time recorded. One major contributor to this company's decline was that no matter how much time you spent, you couldn't exceed 5 hours a month, and if that weren't limited enough, AGLOCO had the right to change their rates at anytime. That wasn't good for obvious reasons, but to make it even more unattractive was the fact that your time was divided into shares, not cash but because AGLOCO was a private company in start-up mode, they had no public shares to distribute. Many people believed at the time that this was intentional, but I do not. I think it was a simple design flaw that they just didn't see coming.
When people saw this and began to realize that AGLOCO couldn't legally distribute unregistered shares to the public, then the scam word was thrown around and that really began to mark the end. It was imperative that AGLOCO could get as much public attention as possible, but with those legal bindings, it was impossible to launch the way it needed to in order to be successful. AGLOCO still has an active web site, although it is little more than a collection of spam links for programs that most of us wouldn't bother with.
In the end, a number of people felt that AGLOCO had used every possible tweak to control exactly how much the program's users got in return for their work, which incidentally didn't amount to much. That further ignited the feeling that the company was fronting all along, and they lost what was left of their image on the Internet. Having said all that, I don't think AGLOCO was a scam. It is a poorly conceived scheme that appeals to those who know very little about finance, share issuance and regulation. Even after I left the program, I received this email about 2 months later..
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 dropping out didn't surprise me, but it did leave me a little disappointed because this was a good idea managed badly, and if I could find something similar in design, I'd like to come up on that, and throw a little something behind it. The program wasn't a scam by any means, but in its current state I'm not sure how successful it could have been because of its history. Now if the concept could somehow be reintroduced with a few modifications, then this mlm might just prove itself as a major player.