2008
Agloco Viewbar Member Distribution / Payout / Payment (Update II)
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First – for those of you who have given some thoughtful ideas, questions and opinions on our posts during the last two weeks – thank you.
At this point, we would like to give some feedback on some of the ideas and thoughts given.
Is the payment plan posted last month a permanent plan? No – as noted in a comment we made this is a plan we wanted to implement now to show Members that even though AGLOCO is currently losing money the hours they are putting in now would be compensated. Our website states that we will make no distributions until profitable. We could have considered a plan that the June, July, and August hours would be paid zero since no profits were forthcoming. We felt that would be an unfair plan to those Members who were supporting AGLOCO in its startup period. That is the purpose of this initial plan.
Can the payments be sped up? Of course they could – although the idea we were considering was making additional ‘bonus’ payments to the early hours (June, July, August, etc 2007 hours) when and if additional funds became available.

Should AGLOCO borrow money to pay Members? We believe this would be a critical error for AGLOCO. Giving out money that it was not earning was the downfall of AllAdvantage and we believe that spending only what AGLOCO makes is the best course for long term stability.
Why have tradable hours? A number of Members have asked about doing this and we looked into it. It seemed like a possible good solution for those Members who had joined now, but were not wanting to wait for AGLOCO to mature to reap some benefits. Getting ownership to Members will be a costly process which would done on a country by country basis. We had hoped to be over 10,000,000 AGLOCO Members at this point to help spread those costs. At a bit over one million Members, AGLOCO is not yet big enough to justify the costs (instead of Member distributions we would have lawyers’ bills.)

By having hours that have a potential residual income stream plus potential quarterly or annual bonus distributions coming in, we felt that these hours would have tradable value today which Members wanting to sell could realize. In this way Members wanting cash now could get it and Members wanting more of AGLOCO’s future could also get it. That is how the tradability of hours relates to the bonus payments and residual payments in this initial distribution plan.

Tradable hours versus ownership? It is not possible to have the AGLOCO hours (or accounts) tradable/salable and still have the potential plan for those hours being used directly in AGLOCO future ownership system (creates a potential securities law conflict). That is why we have asked for feedback on this issue as there have so many requests to make hours tradable. If hours did become salable now and we ended up not using hours in the future for ownership, we would need to develop a new method of giving the ownership of AGLOCO to Members as the Management Company is fully committed that AGLOCO Members get the economic benefits of AGLOCO (and the Management Company gets their 10%). We believe it is this division of economics that is the core of why AGLOCO is a good long term company for Members. – All of this does not mean that in a year or so that we could not use all of the hours to distribute ownership, it just severs any connection at this time.

Where did the $100,000 go in June, July and August? During those June, July and August AGLOCO’s biggest monthly costs were $15,000 to $20,000 in monthly server, bandwidth etc. costs – $15,000 to $25,000 a month for the tech team in Shanghai – and $2,000 a month for the Member Service team in the Philippines (Plus about $1,000 a month in other costs.)

One million Members? Yes AGLOCO has over one million verified Members – with over 350,000 downloads and with over 250,000 Viewbars having been used more than the five hours credit limit

Do Members have to buy things for AGLOCO to succeed? In every economic system trade must occur or it will fail. AGLOCO is no exception. Companies will not want to partner with (or advertise with) AGLOCO if it is not profitable for them. So they will measure the results of their partnering/advertising with AGLOCO and if it is not profitable they will stop. This is one of the great things about Google, Yahoo, Ask etc. Ads on their systems work. People click on some of the ads and then some of them go on to buy. This will also be true for AGLOCO. While no individual Member need be a specific buyer, as a group the AGLOCO Membership needs to be worth advertising to in order for AGLOCO to succeed.

Website? We know it needs work and we know it can take only minutes. Our chief problem here is that in June we used our website editing server to help stabilize the website and we have not had time to install a new editing server. This means all edits must be done by the tech team in Shanghai and we have not wanted to break them from the more revenue generating tasks mainly integrating Ask.com. A project which is still occupying them full time. We hope to rectify this soon.

Beta Viewbar? The Viewbar we are all using is an early version. We are using the beta term to signify that we have a great deal of work left to do on the Viewbar before we feel it is of production quality. It will probably be in beta for another 12 to 18 months at least. Essentially, all of AGLOCO is in Beta right now as we all learn the realities of what can be done and how to do it.

17 ad networks? Prior to the first download of the Viewbar we had an agreement with a third party to supply AGLOCO from 17 ad networks. While working with the tech team to implement this system it became apparent that the third party would not be able to deliver on their promise. We then came up with two networks to use and an ad server system that did not have targeting ability in order to launch the Viewbar. The Ask.com deal is a significant step forward on that front.

Ads for the Viewbars in India? While Ask.com covers searching in India, we have had trouble interesting an ad network for Viewbar ads for our Indian Members. A few weeks ago Tyroo and AGLOCO were unable to reach an agreement to supply ads in India. (While we are committed to working on a Win98 Viewbar, having a local Indian ad network would help move it up on the priority list for the tech team. If any Indian Member has good connections at an Indian ad network we could use a good introduction there. Use email This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it to help make contact.)

Tech questions that go unanswered? Members sometimes post technical questions. Unless this is a widespread problem we usually do not respond to these in the blog. They are best sent to Member services at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it Most often we can not ‘fix’ an individual Member’s tech problem because unless it effects many Members and unless there are a couple of good data points to find out the source of the problem, it is currently too expensive for AGLOCO to try to have a tech person work on a single problem at this point. Some other tech problems which do effect multiple Members are on the correction list; like the ads in the Viewbar not rotating for all users, which is a combination browser and ad server problem. We worked hard to fix this at the server lever and did fix some of the problem (this is a third-party ad server – not ours) Since we knew we would be changing ad servers within a couple of months we decided to focus resources on the Ask.com needs instead of working more on an ‘old’/existing ad server – which we do not even own.

What can you do to help? While we do not have any results from Ask.com yet, we are hopeful that revenue from Ask will put AGLOCO on a stable footing, allowing both distributions and service expansion. We believe that AGLOCO’s active Membership is one of AGLOCO’s biggest strengths. At this point, we hope to start to take real advantage of this strength with some of the revenue from the Ask.com deal. If you are interested in getting more involved and helping to build the company we would like to know. (There were some comments in the blog about setting up a forum and having moderators for example). We are sure some AGLOCO Members could make contributions to the Viewbar, the website, revenue improvements and other operations. Use the This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it address if you are interested. Please indicate any area of interest and any expertise you have – like software engineer.

People making nonsense comments on this blog? By most standards AGLOCO has a very open blog comment policy. When we see spam comments, repetitive comments, rude comments as well as spotting comments with offensive language, we try to delete them. We probably leave too many comments on the blog, but we have felt that even though some of the negative statements are untrue or gross exaggerations – sometimes some of the positive ones are as well. For the most part we see comments as people’s opinions and we try not to edit them.

Thanks for all of your efforts for AGLOCO.

The AGLOCO Development Team

9th October 2007
Agloco Viewbar Member Distribution / Payout / Payment (Oct Update)
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Hello everyone, this is Brian Greenwald. I have not posted on my own here for awhile but I thought I’d write one sharing my personal thoughts on the payment program discussed in the last post (there will be another post with answers to questions made in comments which should be out this week – and written by others).
It’s been a little while since I moved away from the blog to work on some new revenue deals. I hope you are as pleased with Ask.com as we have been – they are far and away the best partner for AGLOCO at this time.

I had some thoughts after seeing the reaction to our last post on Member Distributions. As was expected, some people liked what we had to say, recognizing that AGLOCO is slowly but surely building a sustainable business. Still, some thought the payouts were too low. And, if these were the payout values for every month going forward, I might agree. But, these values are only the beginning. As AGLOCO becomes more profitable, the value of future months’ hours will grow and the time frame in which AGLOCO pays will shrink.
I like to keep in mind that we are trying to have AGLOCO do exactly what we said it would: create a fair system on the internet where Members get paid for what their activity is worth. The simple fact is that Members’ activity in June, July, and August did not generate very much revenue for AGLOCO, and there is no free lunch. As Member surfing becomes more valuable (i.e. generates more revenue for AGLOCO), payouts will increase in turn.

Actually, AGLOCO is doing MORE than what it promised. AGLOCO always said that it would pay Members when it become profitable. If AGLOCO was going strictly by this model, June, July, and August hours would be worth nothing. Still, we know that early Members spent time building the community and thought they should get something for their early surfing hours. So we devised a method to achieve that with the Residual Payments.
Part of this is AGLOCO’s responsibility for at first having (frankly) mediocre revenue deals for Members to capitalize on. But that’s where the Ask deal comes in. As promised, we are building our revenue sources so that Member activity can become more valuable. We’re gaining momentum and coming much closer to profitability with every month that passes. As we’ve said in previous emails and posts, this will be a process that takes time. Soon, not only will we have revenue coming from search and from ads, but we will continue to build our revenue sources wherever money is made from your surfing all over the internet. And, we will build the functionality of the Viewbar and add tools to help the community grow.

I wish this process would move faster, but in order for AGLOCO Members to get the lions share of the company’s value, we had to (at least for now) give up on venture capitalists. This means we have been running on a very lean budget with limited resources (with a development team still working for free). Once we become profitable, we will have a much better ability to expand our investment in making these improvements.
It is very normal for startup companies to have months or years without profitability (we are still a young company - ask google or facebook how long it took them to have their first profitable month). Looking conservatively at our finances (and given the fact that we expect to earn more money as time goes on – if we don’t, the company will go under), it turns out that the best way to provide Members with the most value at this point is to defer some of the value of their payment to a time in which our most conservative projections expect we will have the funds to pay it (personally, I found 10 years to be a bit too long, but I was outvoted by the folks who had just spent three straight days with the budget numbers).

Also remember that the monthly payments in this payout system will stack over time. Combined with the fact that we expect the value of each hour to increase as time goes on, and the payouts can eventually get quite large.
Since I wrote many of them, I encourage you to go back and read what we wrote about Member distributions in the past (for example, here and here). We’ve been quite consistent in saying that AGLOCO will pay when it is profitable and that the process of building revenue is one that will take time (until which, payouts would start out modest and build). Most importantly, we maintain that AGLOCO is NOT a “get rich quick” scheme. If you are looking for a scheme that pays something for nothing, then perhaps AGLOCO is not for you. We talk about AGLOCO’s value proposition in several old posts. In order to pay real money to real people, that money has to come from somewhere. Your surfing needs to earn money for the community. Your referrals’ surfing needs to earn money for the community. It doesn’t just materialize out of thin air. Those Members who are going to join AGLOCO in success are the ones who realize that it is just now laying the foundation, and that it will take time to build a sustainable revenue stream.

And, as discussed, AGLOCO may be developing the ability for Members to trade hours. Then, Members who want the full value of their hours up front can trade them on the open marketplace to other Members who are willing to. We are still looking for more feedback on that issue.
Just another one-off thought. I read some comments that seemed to assume we would have a $100 minimum payout. This is not the case. While we will specifically contact those Members who earned $100 from June, July, and August hours (kudos to those of you in this category), I anticipate that the minimum payout will be between $10-$30, though AGLOCO has not set a firm value yet.
We’ll write another post within the week addressing your questions from this blog, but I wanted to my thoughts on Member distributions. Until then, keep using that Viewbar and the Ask.com search function - the more you do, the more AGLOCO can make for you!

Brian Greenwald
AGLOCO Development Team

Interesting site of the day:
http://agloco-blog.squarespace.com/agloco-success-mike-klingler/2007/10/3/thoughts-after-talking-with-brian-greenwald-today.html
- Mike Klingler weighs in on the distributions announcement

11th September 2007
Agloco Viewbar & Ask.com
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Revenue – As we posted previously, we completed a major revenue partnership. AGLOCO is excited to announce that Ask.com will soon become AGLOCO’s official worldwide default search provider.
First, we have been very impressed with Ask.com’s desire to be in business with the AGLOCO Membership. (We feel that business works best when both parties want to work together.) More importantly, we are impressed with Ask.com’s search performance.

According to the August 14, 2007 report, of the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), Ask rates right with Yahoo and Google in customer satisfaction - Ask 75, Yahoo 79 and Google 78. Also, ForeSee Results added that, “Ask has had the biggest increase over time of any e-business company measured by the ACSI, up 21% since it was first measured… Ask.com seems to be well-positioned to rival Google in the coming years because it has a strong search technology lauded by analysts and users alike.” We will be adding Ask to the Viewbar in the next couple of weeks and we hope you enjoy the results as much as we have.

This is a very important step for AGLOCO and will greatly improve of revenue starting in October. Many of us have been using the Ask.com search system this last month and agree with the comment above that it is equal to and sometimes more helpful than Google. So we hope Members are as equally enthusiastic about Ask as we are.

Tech Update - Since moving the servers and fixing crucial items like hour displays, the tech team has since been occupied by installing the Ask.com system. The tucows download problem has also been fixed. We know we need updates to the website – they have not made the top of the list yet.

Thanks for all of your efforts for AGLOCO.

The AGLOCO Development Team

3rd August 2007
Agloco August Update 2007
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Revenue – We are near completion with one of two improved revenue agreements. These should be implemented in August. They should greatly enhance September’s revenue in search and North American ad revenue. We are also in negotiations with one European network, to improve revenue there. We are in need of better networks in China, Brazil, India, Korea and Japan. We also need a network in the Middle East. If any Member has any leads on those, please post your ideas in the comment section.
Tech Update The tech team reported that the fix to the August hours will be occurring on Thursday the 9th. Until that time the display will not show correct August hours. The last three weeks have consumed our tech team with server improvements – this did not go as the team had anticipated with load balancing problems at the ISP. This should be resolved shortly and they can get back to the other pressing needs of AGLOCO. As we change to improved servers the AGLOCO website will be down for a period of time (the amount of time will depend on where in the world the Member is that is trying to reach the site). People will see a notice page saying we are doing maintenance. Projects like updating the website and emails to all Members will then be attended to.
Media – As reported earlier, Brian recently gave a recorded interview. In it, he talked about the AGLOCO Vision and he answered some questions about the company’s current progress and trajectory. Click here to listen to the interview. Click here for written transcript
Member distributions – Please refer our previous blog post.

Thanks for your continued efforts for AGLOCO.
The AGLOCO Development Team