Agloco, the Web 2.0 pyramid company, to release Viewbar

Agloco, the company that pledges to pay you for surfing the Web, is about to deliver the download that will let you start earning credit.

The Stanford, Calif. company is leading wave of new pyramid-like companies seeking to arbitrage advertising dollars on the Web. By banding together some 700,000 people who have signed up for its service, Agloco believes it can wring out greater advertising dollars on their behalf. As it tracks the pages surfed by its members, it learns about their habits and preferences, and is able to tell advertisers more about your tastes. It says it is not disclosing information about your specific identity.

Agloco is also a pyramid, because it gives you more credit the more you surf, and for any surfing done by people you recruit, and any surfing by people they recruit, and so on. As discussed, the history of such companies is bleak, because the arbitrage opportunities tend to diminish quickly over time — though Agloco argues it is an exception because it will offer real value to advertisers and consumers. See our initial coverage here, here and here.

It said earlier it aims to sign up 10 million members by July 1, so it will need to ramp quickly to meet that goal.

In more details released this morning, Agloco said the following:

–Its Agloco.com site will go down briefly, as it moves the download system for its Viewbar to its server. The Viewbar will sit at the bottom of your screen that tracks your surfing.

–Members will be invited to download in groups of 50,000 a day for a two week period, with Members contacted in the order in which they signed up.

–Agloco Hours: “You will accrue hours in your AGLOCO Member account (current maximum is five direct hours a month). Hours are earned during active surfing on the Internet. The Viewbar has a green light on it that notifies the Member when it is accruing time. Your referrals’ surfing will accumulate hours for you at a 25% rate, meaning if one of your referrals surfs for the maximum five hours you will get 1.25 (0.25 x 5) hours credited to your total referral hours. You can only get credit referral hours up to the amount you directly surf (meaning if you surf 3 hours but a referral surfs 4, you will only get credit for the first 3 of your referral’s 4 hours). AGLOCO accrues these hours each month and also has a cumulative total of all hours earned. These hours are what AGLOCO will use to calculate cash and other distributions. The Viewbar contains a one click inactive button which turns it off and removes it from your screen at any time.”

— Initial Release for Windows only. Max/Linux coming later.

–Cash Distributions: “To be a sustainable entity in the long term, AGLOCO makes Member cash distributions from its positive cash flow (revenue minus costs). Therefore, please do not expect a check after the first couple of months as it will take time to collect revenue from advertisers and this revenue must exceed costs in order to make cash distributions to Members. We will be keeping Members informed of our financials and you can visit the Official company blog at http://blog.agloco.com for the latest updates.”

–Future features, which will update automatically, include a “direct cash back” feature when a member purchases items on sponsor site and a portion of the purchase price is added back to the member’s Agloco account (as described on the Agloco blog at http://blog.agloco.com/index.php/post35/)