AGLOCO Revenue and Cash Payouts

The Viewbar has been out for just about three weeks at this point. We are crossing 20% activation and hope to exceed 50% by the end of the summer. New verified Member signups are back near record levels and growing.

As I mentioned in my last post, stabilizing the Viewbar, the website, and the ad rotation has been our first priority. While it took more time and more money than we had planned, the Viewbar is performing well (ad rotation aside). It has been seamlessly upgraded on Member computers a couple of times and the percentage of Members with Viewbar problems is low. In stabilizing the website, among the steps we took was adding an alternate Viewbar download site (tucows.com). Now that we are more comfortable with the website stability, we will also begin updating the website more frequently again.

As far as the ads go, I am pleased to announce that we have just reached an agreement to make major improvements toward increased Viewbar revenue. As noted earlier, we launched the Viewbar and our ad volume swamped the ad server of our third party supplier. While it has improved, the current system is still not working up to the standards needed (weak rotation ability and unable to connect properly with several networks). Given that the current state of affairs makes it difficult to implement our search, profile and geographic targeting (which are necessary to make Viewbar ads effective), we sought a new arrangement which will give all that to AGLOCO. This will take 5 to 6 weeks to be activated. As a result, revenue for the months of June and July will be low, as the current system cannot be improved any faster.

We will also have the ability for an AGLOCO online ad auction system like Google’s AdSense so advertisers will be able to buy Viewbar ads directly.

As a global community, AGLOCO Members live all over the world. To maximize Member income, we will need to address that with our advertisers (as well as with our Members). Our new ad system will have a country specific system for advertisers (we are told that this will be available at the end of the summer and not for all countries). At that point we will likely have to ask each Member for a language preference to make the advertisers aware. Keep in mind that it is very costly to support multiple languages (it’s easy to just display them, but language support includes full Member support, email communication, etc., in that language), so additional supported languages will probably not be forthcoming before that.

In order to reach profitability quickly (which is necessary to make cash distributions to Members - as I will detail below), we keep AGLOCO expenses to a minimum. Many of you make great suggestions for improvements we could make to AGLOCO, but unfortunately they are not yet in our affordable budget. We have tried to implement the less costly improvements while recognizing that the major changes will have to wait longer. We do hear all of your suggestions, but AGLOCO needs to become sustainable and make Member distributions as fast as possible. To keep expenses low, for example, in the year or so we have been working on AGLOCO, no development team member has been paid for their work (not to mention that some of you have been working very hard to help build AGLOCO as well and have not yet received the rewards of that work either). And with that we are turning our attention to revenue (and distributions to members).

Members often ask when they will be paid by AGLOCO, and how much they will be paid. I must admit that I have a bit of hesitation to address this issue, only because I do not want Members to misunderstand anything I say and/or take it as a “promise or prediction” of what AGLOCO will exactly do in the future. So, I will write the following with the disclaimer that everything I say below, specifically regarding when Members will be paid or how much, is only an illustration and does not constitute a promise of any sort. Capiche? Capiche.

Taken from AGLOCO Official Blog