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Wednesday, March 28, 2007

AGLOCO - Another Pyramid Scheme?

When I first saw this I felt 'yeah right!'. Apparently its a service that pays you for surfing the net. I have seen plenty of them earlier but this one seems to have grown so much in popularity that it might be actually prove little hard to ignore. It started with much fanfare and a grand advertising campaign.

An acronym for 'A Global Community', AGLOCO appears to be a pyramid scheme even if people may argue against that observation. It claims to pay you for surfing the web for a maximum of 5 hours a day. This might seem a long shot, but a little Wikipedia digging will tell you that Agloco finds its roots in AllAdvantage, an internet advertising company that was the pioneer in the paid to search schemes. The company, though very successful at one time, however was forced to shut shop after the dot-com crash caused steep declines in ad revenue. This time AGLOCO hopes to base its business model on that of AllAdvantage minus the mistakes that it made. Once you are a member, you would have to download a viewbar that rests below your browser that monitors your internet surfing habits. They promise no pop-ups and malware of any kind. At the moment the view bar is yet to be launched.

As this article says, current affiliates programs and targeted advertising are way better than before and so this model makes more business sense in the current scenario. For me, as long as I don't have to fork out money to start off I have nothing to lose. So like a cash starved desi grad student, I signed up. (and it doesn't really take more than a minute. Just 5 fields to fill up and you are good to go)

So those of you who are actually interested might want to go here and sign up. Give it a shot, like most internet addicts, you only have everything to gain.

8 comments:

  1. and of course... earn a bit through referrals through ur insanely popular blog ;)

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  2. [Amit]
    Heh heh. You didn't sign up did you?
    When would you ever do me a favor?! :)

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  3. Although I actively promoted AGLOCO initially, they still haven't released the Viewbar which is going to track hours spent online. They had promised an early March release date and no signs of it so far.

    BTW articles like these are already sounding the death knell for AGLOCO.

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  4. "It claims to pay you for surfing the web for a maximum of 5 hours a day..."

    Ummm... no, the limit is actually 5 hours a MONTH.

    It is shocking how much people who peddle the scheme misunderstand about it. If, big IF, Agloco ever releases their software, the tortuous trickle of cents per month will make people take it off as fast as they installed it.

    As Patrix pointed out my article, I tried to clarify this and other myths and misunderstandings.

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  5. [Patrix] & [Babak]
    Thanks for the link. Pretty much clears up a lot of things I did have reservations about. But there are still some lingering doubts. I read somewhere that when AllAdvantage came out and reached its peak before its fall, it was able to pay up its users. Even when it crashed it paid around $120 million to the users. My point is, I am not investing a penny's worth in this company. What I am going to get would be an extra anyhow. I surf the net over 10 hrs a day, so there is no extra effort from my side. So basically, I really don't have to give a damn about how well or badly the company performs.

    Unless, it is a scam and it will peddle my personal information. Something I must be careful about.

    Anyway, your info was pretty useful. Thanks you too. And Babak, well researched article indeed!

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  6. @Piker
    Alright.... *clicks on "here"

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  7. [Amit]
    Hehe, thanks. You just won me a million dollars! :)

    ReplyDelete