AdGoggle Review: Paid to click mobile ads
There is no information on the AdGoggle website indicating who owns or runs the business.
The domain ‘adgoggle.com’ was registered on the 17th October 2011, however the domain registration information is set to private.
As always, if a MLM company is not openly upfront about who is running or owns it, think long and hard about joining and/or handing over any money.
The AdGoggle Product Line
AdGoggle has no retailable products or services, instead the company and its members promote a free mobile app.
This AdGoggle app is an advertising platform that, as far as I can tell, overlays itself on the users mobile browser while they are browsing the internet, displaying ads from the AdGoggle advertising network.
The AdGoggle Compensation Plan
AdGoggle charge no membership fees and as such members generate revenue for the company when they and other AdGoggle members click ads.
Third party advertisers pay to display ads on the AdGoggle network and for each click recorded through the AdGoggle mobile app, the company shares advertising revenue with its members.
How much of the advertising revenue will be shared is at this point undetermined:
At this point in time AdGoggle has yet to finalize its payout percentage ratio. We will finalize this when we launch.
I suspect this is due to actual advertising revenue being currently only theoretical.
Residual income wise AdGoggle are using a unilevel style MLM compensation structure that places you at the top and everyone you’ve recruited directly beneath you (your first level).
In turn, anyone recruited by your first level is placed on your second level and so on and so forth. Again, no specifics have yet been released on how much of a percentage will be paid on downline ad clicks or how deep in the unilevel.
Citing downline figures of around 5,000 though, one would assume the commissions AdGoggle project they will pay out on the unilevel will be quite deep level wise.
Finally AdGoggle also have what they’re calling the “Platinum 1000” club, which will be composed of the first 1,000 people in AdGoggle to have a downline of 5,000 or more members.
As a reward for being part of the Platinum 1000 club, AdGoggle will assign members who sign up through the AdGoggle site without a referral ID to the downlines of Platinum 1000 club members. Presumably this will be done at random.
Joining AdGoggle
Membership to AdGoggle is free, with the company stating that
It’s free of charge to sign up for the AdGoggle Prelaunch, and free of charge after we launch. Signup is ALWAYS going to be free.
Also, there will be no fees charged or payments required at any point in time.
Conclusion
The success of AdGoggle primarily revolves around three concepts, the first being the ongoing recruitment of new members, the second these members clicking ads and the third the attraction of third-party advertisers to fund it all.
With no membership fees or cost to members, despite heavily marketing the need to go and recruit as many people as possible this isn’t really a concern. That said, AdGoggle are quite heavily promoting the magical number of a 5,000 strong downline:
You can realistically earn USD 1,000-1,500 every month. You just need to get 100 friends to sign up here (it’s free). If each of these 100 friends in turn gets 50 of their friends to sign up, YOUR AdGoggle network will now total 5,100 people.
It will be difficult for you to invite and sign up 5000 people directly under you. But if you can just get 100 people to sign up, and these 100 people, who also want to grow their networks, in turn invite and sign up just 50 people each, you’ll have a 5,100 person network in no time.
This “recruit 5,000 people” theme is heavily promoted by AdGoggle but realistically everyone that joins isn’t going to reach this target (there aren’t enough people on the planet, let alone using the internet).
That said it’s important to understand why they’re doing this, and that’s because more members = more convincing numbers to show potential advertisers.
The problem?
Value wise there’s not much in it for the advertisers. AdGoggle members are paid each time a member clicks an ad, meaning that whereas traditionally the incentive of an ad clicker is genuine interest in whatever is being advertised (good for the advertiser), in AdGoggle’s ad network there’s a good chance ads are only being clicked to generate revenue to pay members (bad for the advertiser).
With little to no value to be found from advertisers, this in turn kills the only revenue stream AdGoggle have, meaning members won’t earn anything (or close to peanuts).
What you’re left with is a company with a ton of members and little to no revenue being generated due to a lack of advertiser value.
Yes the advertising industry is huge but all advertising is certainly not created equally when it comes to advertiser value. With members having a huge incentive to click ads and bill advertisers (that incentive being the amount of ads clicked directly corresponding to the revenue generated by AdGoggle), genuine interest in what’s being advertised is reduced greatly, if not altogether.
The most recent example of this advertising dependent MLM business model failing spectacularly was with Wazzub. Instead of a mobile app Wazzub had a search portal that featured ads, hoping that member traffic would generate enough revenue for them to share out.
Despite stating they’d start paying member back in May 2012, to date I haven’t heard of anyone being paid. Infact last I heard Wazzub were talking about some sort of private share offer where members could purchase shares in the company or something (although this has never been discussed openly by the company to date).
Wazzub allegedly attracted membership of over 6 million and couldn’t make the advertisers will pay us to click their ads model work so I’m not really seeing how just a few months later AdGoggle hope to do it with a mobile app.
Yes the platform is different but fundamentally you’re still looking at the same problems Wazzub ad, that primarily being a lack of value to advertisers.
Amusingly, AdGoggle also seem to be a little confused as to whether or not they are a MLM company or not. Taken from the AdGoggle FAQ:
When I build my AdGoggle network, does that mean I am just enriching the person who invited me and the people above me in the network?
Yes, you do enrich the people above you in the network. Likewise, people who sign up under you will in turn enrich you when their friends sign up!
However, AdGoggle does not operate like a multi-level system in any way whatsoever.
Except that they do. Simply put AdGoggle uses a unilevel MLM compensation structure, which by their own admission places people above and below you (people signing up under you). This of course creates multiple levels, hence the name multi-level marketing.
As of July 27th, AdGoggle claim they have a membership of 1,141 and have penciled in an August 28th official launch date.
Oz,
I’m the CEO and founder of the start-up company AdGoggle. Our pre-registration website went live this week, so I was surprised (pleasantly) to come across this article while Googling.
I found your article well thought out, with superior insight and analysis. A lot of what you stated were the key issues I had to grapple with while forming the idea for this start-up business.
AdGoggle has a simple vision of allowing users to view and engage in advertisements that truly interest them. Likewise, we want to be able to allow advertisers to accurately target their audience.
There’s nothing new in that. Google, Facebook, and everybody else are trying to do the same thing as well. But nobody has been able to really solve this problem effectively. At best, we are looking at 5% click through rates on Google. On Facebook, the average is 0.5-1%. So lots of ads being displayed, but to uninterested users.
We will share all ad dollars earned based on a multi-tier/multi-level system. BUT not for an unlimited number of levels. Only up to 3 levels. So theoretically, a person below you in your network can actually have a much larger AdGoggle network than you (because his Level 3 network, which is Level 4 in your network, will NOT be included in your network).
So to some extent, it does really matter when you sign-up and who you are under in the AdGoggle network. The only benefit of joining early, I would think, is that you would have more people to share and invite to. Because once a person has signed-up, he or she cannot sign-up again under another person. Unless they play around with having multiple Facebook IDs.
You brought up an excellent point on users clicking on advertisements to get paid i.e. click fraud. Click fraud is definitely not sustainable because advertisers will get no ROI on their ads, and eventually they will stop advertising. When that happens the business model fails.
We do have some ideas and strategies on how to counter click fraud. All these will be obvious and clear when we launch the AdGoggle mobile app (target is in 2 months time).
All directors, executives and staff of AdGoggle will be made known when we launch our mobile app. For now, we are still in stealth pre-registration mode.
Our pre-registration website went live last week. We now have 4,087 registered users, and 2,949 Facebook Page likes. Of course, all these numbers mean nothing unless the business model works. But it’s a good start, and a start-up company has to start somewhere.
The road ahead is long and testing for sure. We have lots of iterations to go through, maybe some pivots etc. Success rate is typically low for IT start-ups. So I can’t guarantee anybody that this idea will succeed. But we aren’t taking any money from our users, and I am only investing my own money in this venture, so my conscience is clear.
I agree with a lot of what you said in your well written article. Obviously, you are not privy to a lot of our ideas, plans, strategies etc, so some of your points were not on the button due to this lack of information (but perfectly correct with the limited information you had access to).
Thanks once again for writing about us. When we do launch our app, we’ll get to see whether the idea and vision works. The proof is in the pudding.
In the meantime, if I may put in a plug, why don’t you sign-up with AdGoggle, invite some friends, and see what happens! We are using Facebook Sign In as we feel that Facebook Sign In gives us better quality emails (instead of fake emails), plus we don’t have to develop and maintain the sign-in system.
Also, with Facebook Sign In, our uses can leverage on their Facebook friends to share and invite.
Cheers.
Wong
AdGoggle
In other words, you are mobile version of Wazzub?
I hope you learned your lessons from them. They are WAY too secretive, and a complete PR disaster, IMHO.
Hey Wong, thanks for joining the discussion.
With a comp plan though, how can you ever ascertain genuine interest over “I just want to earn money”?
Google’s tracking is pretty sophisticated these days (although can be off if there’s no inventory), but they don’t have to worry (too much) about end-users clouding their stats as there’s nothing in it for them (Adsense members trying to game the system aside).
In AdGoggle with commissions paid out for clicking ads, this is different.
Technical ideas and strategies?
How do you address the fundamental concept that your members don’t get paid unless they click ads? You can’t “thought police” your members so while you might be able to prevent clickbombs and such, so how is this going to work on a deeper level?
K. Chang – Thanks for the pointer. We are opening up gradually. It’s been a crazy 1 week, and the priority now is tweaking the site, fixing bugs, maximising coversions (people who visit our site actually signing up) etc.
We are running lean, as we should, so everything needs to be prioritized.
Oz – If AdGoggle cannot prevent/minimize click fraud, then it’s not going to be sustainable. This is clear, and agreed upon. Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. If advertisers do not obtain a good ROI on ther ads they will stop advertising and AdGoggle will immediately fall, along with my own personal financial investment.
I won’t reveal too much at this stage, but will throw in an idea for discussion sake. What if our ads are all ‘incentive based’ ads eg. the users only get paid if and when they (or somebody in their network) actually purchase eg. an app, a digital book etc?
Such ads won’t have any issues of ‘click fraud’ as the advertiser only pays if and when a transaction has been concluded.
CPA as opposed to CPC would go a long way in that members can’t just click ads to generate revenue for the company… but then you might as well just launch a affiliate shopping network and just share cashback revenue with your members no?
There’s plenty of them around (although I don’t think any using a third-party affiliate shopping network + MLM model have really taken off).
In any case,
you guys only mention CPC on your website so it’s a moot point. Might want to update that FAQ on how the business works if you’re going to include CPA. Otherwise members are signing up under false pretenses on the specifics of how revenue is generated.
Thanks for the feedback and advise Oz. We are iterating, revising, tweaking etc as we go along. It’s been only 1 week since our pre-registration website went live. So admittedly, there’s lot of outstanding things that needs to be done for sure.
Wong,
I totally agree with Oz. I signed up and am promoting based on the fact that the business model is cpc. If you change it you better do it quick or a LOT of people are not going to be happy down the road.
Do you guyz plan to allow user to use twitter account to register for adgoggle? I wish to have this feature so much!
but in adgoggle app which mobile phones supported?
If I have simple mobile which have no other apps so I can not participate in this offer?
how and whare could I get adgoggle mobile app. and which type of mobile should I have?
for the advertiser not seems good….with the same money can do a campaign better in another site…
Just came across this page while searching for review on google. Hope to get some answers here as Mr. Wong had joined the discussion.
There is no update after January this year in the announcements section of adgoggle. Has the company started launched completely? Have anyone got paid yet from this company?
The discussion was only active for 6-7 days, 11 months ago.
And then it has 3 comments after that, with very little response. The business idea has probably failed completely.