Thalasar Ventures

My dislike for the marketing scam Agloco is well documented. In the most recent email I got from them flogging the scheme, they have actively encouraged their members to commit click fraud.

Here’s the email I received from Danny Jensen (The Community Manager)

Our first data points are in with our AGLOCO/Ask search system. Average net revenue for AGLOCO per click is already over US$0.20 – the average Member click through rate on ads on the Ask search page – 20% to 25% of the time the ad is clicked on (one ad click for every 4 to 5 searches).
If every AGLOCO Member did 4 to 5 Ask searches a day and they clicked on average just one ad, the revenue generated for the AGLOCO community would be US$6.00 per month per Member. This would be a great start to building revenue for Member distributions.
AGLOCO’s challenge is to get every Member to have the Viewbar open all the time and to use the Ask search box to make their searches.
If you haven’t used the Viewbar to do an Ask search. We implore you to do it now. Member feedback on the Ask search results has been extremely favorable (most Members reporting they rate Ask results as good as Google’s or better.).

In other words if you want to get paid, do ASK.com searches and then click on the ads. This is completely and utterly insane. This clearly violates the terms of service with ASK and furthermore it’s completely and utterly dishonest. They lay out a clear plan for how to be stealthy (Do 4-5 searches per day, click on 1 ad) and then encourage people to do it. I cannot see how ASK.com can condone this behaviour. As an advertiser I would be livid. Click fraud is bad enough in today’s market but to have a company like Agloco actively encourage click fraud by it’s members in order to generate revenue – unfracking believable.
Update: I reported this to Ask.com (I sent them a full copy of the email.)I got this from Andrew Moers over there.

“Thank you very much. We are investigating immediately.”

I asked Andrew this morning for an update and I am waiting to hear back but it’s apparent that a significant portion of Agloco’s toolbar users are overseas. This isn’t a particularly valued market for Ask.com since they are largely focused on the consumer search market in the United States. I wonder what ASK.com is going to do to maintain click quality in light of this revelation. The email reads like a pretty clear directive to commit click fraud. I am pretty certain Agloco member who are getting upset about not getting paid are going to take it as such.
Take a look at this post.
http://blog.agloco.com/index.php/post75/
Almost all the complaints on that blog post are from people complaining about not getting paid by Agloco. Clearly they are going to seize the opportunity to actually get paid by clicking on ” one ad click for every 4 to 5 searches.” If I were an ASK.com advertiser I would be asking some pretty hard questions about Agloco.