speak-asia-online-logoWhen I first reviewed the Speak Asia Online business opportunity back in March, it was hard to escape the fact that, without recruiting, Speak Asia members were only able to make a maximum of $20 a week signing up as a Premium Panelist.

With a joining fee of $220 and interview + test fee of $60, this means that you’re looking at 14 weeks (over 3 months) just to recoup your initial investment in the company.

If we factor in recruitment however, Speak Asia not only pays a recurring weekly commission tied into how many new members you bring in, but also handsomely rewards members for the daily amount of new members recruited.

Recently, at in-house Speak Asia conference ‘GenX Bazaar 2011’, Speak Asia made a public projection on their membership numbers and expected growth. Speak Asia Chief Marketing Officer Vivek Gautam stated that ‘by December, we wants (sic) to take have 10 million panelists on board‘.

Currently Speak Asia claim to have 1.5 million members and as of May 10th, has been in business for one year. With December 2011 just seven months away, Speak Asia have now set themselves up for the monumental task of expanding their current membership by over 650%.

Hard enough to do with a traditional business model, but what about Speak Asia’s massively recruitment dependent compensation plan?

Well for starters, those current 1.5 million members would have to directly recruit an additional 8.5 million members. In turn if these new members wanted to generate a high enough residual commission to live off, they too need to go out and recruit.

At $1 a week per standard panelist and $3 for a premium panelist, this means at 10 million members, even with India’s large population things are going to come undone somewhere. Note that this residual commission is only paid on active members and nobody is going to remain active if they can’t find people to sign up under them.

With daily recruitment quotas required to participate in Speak Asia’s team bonuses (where the real money is) at 2 people for Team Bonus 1 (which would pay out $20 USD) and for Team Bonus 2 at least 8 Standard Panelists or 4 Premium Panelists per organisation, which is you and anyone in your downline), it’s easy to see how the numbers just don’t add up.

At 10 million members, participation in Speak Asia’s first team bonus alone would see membership numbers double. And even if only half of their members participated that’s still an extra 5 million people per day feeding the Speak Asia machine.

For Team Bonus 2 it gets even more ridiculous as doubling the current membership number daily is just the benchmark minimum. With four Premium panelists required to earn any money off the bonus, somewhere in the company binary organisation a minimum of four new members are going to be recruited daily.

Great if you’re sitting at the top of the binary plan but if you’re new, you’ve got no option but to get out there and recruit. With ten million panelists in the company, that’s one hell of a deep and wide binary organisation.

Given the numbers, I find it highly suspect that Speak Asia is going to be able to increase their membership by 650% over the next seven months. I mean longterm it’s just not sustainable. Even with the entire 1.15 billion population of India working for Speak Asia, what next?

By my calculations if everyone remained active within the company it’d then only take less than five days for them to exhaust the entire population of Earth.

No doubt that won’t stop them trying though.