Things I like .....: AGLOCO Official response to members on Payouts

The AGLOCO Official has responded to the comments made by members to the AGLOCO update made on the 11 April 2007 in respect to the issues on Referrals, Members Cash Payouts and Information & Transparency of AGLOCO.

Please note that this clarification was posted in the comments section. Since there are currently 208 comments by members, I post the full text here for easy reference.

AGLOCO Official said,

April 13, 2007 @ 10:29 am

Just a quick comment on a couple of thoughts.

First, we are having another record week for new Member signups. It is truly great to see the efforts of the early AGLOCO pioneers who got this started as well as the efforts of the many newly recruiting Members building a constantly increasing “snowball” of new Member sigups.

Referral Issues – There have been two issues brought up here recently, and both are actually old issues. One was about the verification email referral link not being complete and the other was about the verification email link resulting in an error message. First let me say that in both cases the referral is correctly in the system and when the new Member does verify their email address that person will be recorded correctly to the person who made the referral. As to the ‘broken’ link, David North is correct that some email providers have different ways of reading emails. In order to reduce the spam filters and blocking of verification emails a couple of months ago we put all verification emails in plain text form. This works well on gmail and hotmail, but not all mail services – I will see if we can add some more language in the verification email to help people who get this problem. The second ‘issue’, an error message, is the result of trying to sign someone up on a computer that is currently logged into another AGLOCO Member account. This happens very rarely and is usually solved by simply logging out and then clicking on the verification email link.

Regarding Member cash payouts – I made the comment about this in my post as I saw several Members promoting instant cash and get rich quick language. While we look forward to making cash payments, AGLOCO has consistently stated that cash payments would be from AGLOCO’s positive cash. One of the biggest mistakes that AllAdvantage made was to promise a fixed hourly payout for browsing. They failed because they were paying out more money than they were bringing in and so they ran out of money very quickly. AGLOCO needs to be a sustainable business to make it worth anything for its Members. Building a sustainable company involves three primary things. First, building and maintaining significant revenue sources; second, keeping operating costs low (including salaries – AGLOCO Management has not yet been paid any salary); and third, paying Members the net cash flow. The hours you earn from the moment you first start using the Viewbar will count towards your cash payments. As I mention in the post:

“Members will begin to accumulate hours from when they first start using the Viewbar (and referral hours will also be earned). Those hours will not be wasted. Both overall hours and monthly hours will be used in determining distributions to Members.”

Believe me, I wish I could offer more concrete details on when Members will be paid and how much. It would make things much simpler. But, the truth we have stated all along is that it simply depends on how well AGLOCO performs and how soon. And, your willingness to both manage and impact this uncertainty alongside AGLOCO Managment (such as through your referrals and Viewbar use) is precisely what makes you a founder. While I completely sympathize with the desire to get cash payouts immediately, some of you are essentially asking me to make promises our balance sheet can’t keep, and I’m not going to do that. Again, this pressure is exactly what seductively led AllAdvantage down the disastrous road it followed.

Information and transparency – To answer some specific questions: Yes, we will be disclosing AGLOCO’s financials, and we will do this as soon as we have income for a couple of months so we can show meaningful numbers. No, we will not be disclosing details of deals with advertisers, etc. (it could stop some companies from doing business with AGLOCO if we gave away too many details). We will not be posting lists of every advertiser – nor does Yahoo, Google or CBS for that matter. As those of you who are in business know, there will be times when, even though we have an answer to a question, we will need to stay quiet during negotiations (and we have several items like that right now).

Hope this helps a bit.

Brian