Trader’s Narrative

A few weeks ago, I digressed from my usual topic and wrote a public service announcement on a new make money online scheme called Agloco. I was more surprised than anyone, when it made it to the front page of digg and even more so when my host took a licking and kept on ticking.

I thought, I’ll revisit this in a few months when Agloco implodes to have a good I told you so moment and do a Nelson: ‘Ha-Haaaa!’ (point finger).

From the Horse’s Mouth

But it turns out that it won’t take that long. When monitoring my traffic, I noticed many coming from the official Agloco blog. So I went to see what was up and I discovered this message posted by Brian Greenwald (bold is my emphasis):

AGLOCO’s early revenue will not immediately translate into cash distributions to Members. While we do not know how large our initial revenue will be, we do know that AGLOCO has operating costs to pay.[…] As such, the cash payouts will not begin until there is a comfortable balance between AGLOCO’s free cash flow and AGLOCO’s expenses.

I wonder how many of the Agloco pumpers and ‘members’ would go to work at a company that said, Sure, we’ll hire you, but you’ll have to work for months and months… we really can’t say how long… without pay. But we’ll give you a salary just as soon as there is a comfortable balance between our revenues and expenses..

Mmmmm-kay. Riiiiight.

Do the guys behind this crazy scheme really expect people to pollute their screen with the Agloco (still non-existant vaporware) viewbar and not be compensated? … until some, yet unknown, date in the future?

What does “comfortable” mean anyway? And how comfortable would it have to be before a ‘member’ sees a red cent?

And what about all the accounting chicanery that can go on? As much as they like to misrepresent this and say that the ‘members’ own the company Agloco is a private company. And as a private company they are not held to the more stringent standards of disclosure that public companies are.

Not that being a public company ever kept corporations from playing creative games with their books. Ever heard of Enron? WorldCom? Tyco? Global Crossing? Do I need to go on?

Think of the savings! Agloco doesn’t even have to hire $500/hr accountants. They can just present some scrap pieces of paper and say, Umm, sorry guys, not this month. Came close though. Let’s try for next month. Keep surfing (suckers).

Beginning of the End

This is the beginning of the end for Agloco. Before they could’ve succeeded they needed to have a massive base of people using their (still non-existent) viewbar. To begin with the scheme wasn’t all that attractive: a circuitous path through several shifting stages where 5 measly hours a MONTH would be swapped for ‘agloco hours’ (??) and then several other stages to finally reach a pittance of a payment.

But now, who is going to surf, with a viewbar crowding their screen, spewing ads… all for… what? a promise of some kind of payment when Agloco’s non-public accounting is ‘comfortable’? who’s going to expose themselves to the viewbar without knowing when or if they will ever be compensated?

To me and you it might seem obvious that Agloco is done. But human nature being what it is, not everyone will want to acknowledge the obvious. Some will even deny what is in front of their faces and keep on promoting Agloco. But it won’t matter.

As signups don’t convert to downloads and users, it becomes irrelevant when (or if) they ever release this fabled ‘viewbar’ (which, by the way, just missed another release date!) And without a user base, Agloco’s advertisers will pull out since there is no audience.

If you have an Agloco URL, better start trying to sell it now to some sucker who might think it is still worth something. Within a few weeks or months it will be worth nothing.

“Buddy, Have I got an URL for you. It’s brand new, hardly used. Worth its weight in gold. Trust me, would I lie to you?”

John Chow is in Toronto this weekend. Hopefully we’ll get together for lunch with other area bloggers and see if we can hash this out. It would be very cool to meet John within a week of getting together with Darren and the b5 media team. As the dot com mogul, I know John will insist on springing for the check