Agora Advantage operates in the marketing MLM niche. A California corporate address is provided on the company’s website.

On said website, Agora Advantage claims to have been in business for “8+ years”.

Agora Advantage’s website domain (“agoraadvantage.com”), was first registered in 2015. This tracks with Agora Advantage’s social media account history:

Heading up Agora Advantage we have co-founders Vince Baker, Mike Driggers, Brian Jacks and Steve Aust.

Vince Baker doesn’t appear to have an MLM history. He runs Vince Baker Ministries and pitches himself as “a highly motivated Business Marketing Agent, Internet Marketing Coach, Public Speaker, and Author.”

Mike Driggers is known to BehindMLM as Vice President of the GoFun Rewards Ponzi scheme.

Driggers bailed just as GoFun Rewards collapsed in May 2013.

After GoFun Rewards, Driggers reinvented himself as a marketing coach.

Brian Jacks has a non-MLM history in finance and real-estate.

Steve Aust is Chief Growth Officer and Director of Ion Digital Corp, a crypto integration firm.

As per Aust’s Ion Digital Corp corporate bio, he’s

a seasoned executive with 20 years of experience in venture capital, direct sales, and energy solutions.

As the co-founder and president of Verdant, he passionately brought integrated solutions to the global market and helped raise over $100 million in Venture Capital for various direct sales companies – leading them through successful IPOs.

Verdant appears to be a collapsed automotive turned energy company. The news section of Verdant’s website hasn’t been updated since 2015.

Read on for a full review of Agora Advantage’s MLM opportunity.

Agora Advantage’s Products

Agora markets itself as a ‘business solutions provider”.

Agora Advantage is leading the way in business solutions and strategies.

No matter what type of business you own, we have solutions and strategies to help you succeed.

Solutions marketed on Agora Advantage’s website include:

  • internet marketing – “SEO, Paid Traffic, Video Marketing, and Review Marketing”
  • eLearning Platforms – “a powerful way for entrepreneurs to learn how to be successful in business”
  • website development – “keep[s] up with the ‘design trends’ [and] focuses on SEO and conversion”
  • new business launch – “our powerful resources and strategies will help your new business succeed”
  • credit card processing – “we can help business reduce their existing rates or find new solutions to better suit your company’s needs”
  • business financing – “we have many solutions that are ready to serve you with great rates for your financial needs or business goals”

No specific pricing is provided for the above marketed services. Instead prospective retail clients are directed to “book a free consultation”.

Things get a bit confusing, as elsewhere on its website Agora Advantage presents Business Package Details:

Agora Advantage’s Business Packages start off free and climb to $1297 a month.

  • Market Awareness (free) – includes Agora Marketplace, access to Business Network events and a LocalConnect business directory listing
  • Market Partner ($97 a month) – adds sales support, Business Academy, video conferencing, Agora Business Compass and Business Locator
  • Market Elevator ($197 a month) – adds “automation & workflows”
  • Market Accelerator ($697 a month) – adds Instagram marketing
  • Market Dominator ($1297 a month) – adds “press release”

Agora Advantage’s Compensation Plan

Agora Advantage’s compensation plan pays on commissions generated by Business Package subscription sales.

I’m assuming “book a free consultation” sales are also included, however this isn’t really clear as there’s no pricing to work off.

Because of this I’ve only referenced Business Packages in the break down below.

Agora Advantage Affiliate Ranks

There are five ranks within Agora Advantage’s compensation plan.

Along with their respective qualification criteria, they are as follows:

  1. Member Advisor – sell a Business Package
  2. Qualified Member Advisor – either sell two Business Packages and recruit at least one Member Advisor or higher or sell three Business Packages
  3. Regional Member Advisor – either sell three Business Packages and recruit at least two Member Advisors or higher or sell five Business Packages, generate two Qualified Member Advisors or higher in two separate recruitment legs, and generate and maintain 100 PV and 2000 GV a month
  4. National Member Advisor – either sell five Business Packages and maintain two personally recruited Member Advisors or higher or sell seven Business Packages, generate three Qualified Member Advisors or higher in three separate recruitment legs, generate two Regional Member Advisors or higher in two seperate recruitment legs, and generate and maintain 200 PV and 10,000 GV a month
  5. Executive Member Advisor – either sell seven Business Packages and maintain two personally recruited Member Advisors or higher or sell nine Business Packages, generate four Qualified Member Advisors or higher in four separate recruitment legs, generate three Regional Member Advisors or higher in three separate recruitment legs, generate two National Member Advisors in two seperate recruitment legs, and generate and maintain 300 PV and 35,000 GV a month

Note the following alternative rank qualification criteria is available from

  • Qualified Member Advisor – generate 1000 PV a month
  • Regional Member Advisor – generate 2000 PV a month
  • National Member Advisor – generate 10,000 PV a month
  • Executive Member Advisor – generate 35,000 PV a month

PV stands for “Personal Volume”. PV is sales volume generated via the sale of Agora Advantage Business Packages to retail customers and recruited affiliates.

Sales volume is not a 1:1 ratio against the price of a Business Package subscription, it is a reduced amount. Agora Advantage do not disclose PV amounts corresponding with Business Packages.

GV stands for “Group Volume”. GV is PV generated by an affiliate and their downline.

Note that Business Package subscriptions must be active to count towards rank qualification.

An Agora Advantage affiliate can purchase a Business Package. This will count as one sale.

Referral Commissions

Agora Advantage affiliates earn 50% on sales volume generating by personal Business Package sales.

Note that if an Agora Advantage affiliate requests help from another affiliate to close a sale.

Sales volume on assisted sales is paid split 20% (the helping affiliate) and 30% (the affiliate making the sale).

Residual Commissions

Agora Advantage pays residual commissions via a unilevel compensation structure.

A unilevel compensation structure places an affiliate at the top of a unilevel team, with every personally recruited affiliate placed directly under them (level 1):

If any level 1 affiliates recruit new affiliates, they are placed on level 2 of the original affiliate’s unilevel team.

If any level 2 affiliates recruit new affiliates, they are placed on level 3 and so on and so forth down a theoretical infinite number of levels.

Agora Advantage caps payable unilevel team levels at seven.

Residual commissions are paid as a percentage of generated sales volume across these seven levels, based on rank:

  • Member Advisors earn 9% on level 1 (personally recruited affiliates), 7% on level 2 and 5% on level 3
  • Qualified Member Advisors earn 9% on level 1 (personally recruited affiliates), 7% on level 2, 5% on level 3 and 3% on level 4
  • Regional Member Advisors earn 9% on level 1 (personally recruited affiliates), 7% on level 2, 5% on level 3 and 3% on levels 4 and 5
  • National Member Advisors earn 9% on level 1 (personally recruited affiliates), 7% on level 2, 5% on level 3, 3% on levels 4 and 5 and 5% on level 6
  • Executive Member Advisors earn 9% on level 1 (personally recruited affiliates), 7% on level 2, 5% on level 3, 3% on levels 4 and 5 and 5% on levels 6 and 7

Bonus Pools

Agora Advantage takes 10% of company-wide sales volume and places it into three rank-specific Bonus Pools:

  • Regional Member Advisors receive a share in a 5% Bonus Pool
  • National Member Advisors receive a share in a 3% Bonus Pool
  • Executive Member Advisors receive a share in a 2% Bonus Pool

Individual share percentages in each pool are determined by each qualifying affiliate’s GV.

How often Agora Advantage pay out the Bonus Pools isn’t specified but is assumed to be monthly.

Vendor Commissions

If an Agora Advantage affiliate refers a third-party vendor to sell something through Agora Advantage, they earn 3% of company-wide generated sales volume from that specific vendor.

Joining Agora Advantage

Agora Advantage affiliate membership is $97 a month.

Agora Advantage Conclusion

When I saw Agora Advantage claim they’d been in business for eight years, I took it at face value. Everything just kinda feels… dated.

To be fair at this point I went back and approached Agora Advantage’s website as a perspective business client wondering what they sold.

When I first visited Agora Advantage’s website it wasn’t until I hit the footer that I found the business packages.

Turns out there’s a button to the packages in the carousel at the top of the page. It doesn’t auto-rotate but maybe I’d manually rotated a few times.

That aside, everything you need to know about the business is on their homepage. It’s just a bit info-dense.

BehindMLM’s website is set up the same way but we do break off into articles. This navigation isn’t straightforward on Agora Advantage’s website.

I can’t speak to Agora Advantage’s marketing services as a whole but I am skeptical about some things.

Agora Advantage make a big deal about Local Connect.

It’s presented as a third-party business directory site but there are references to Agora Advantage (“get listed today” button, FaceBook page link etc.).

My issue is who is using online business directories in 2024? It’s a worthless service that died out as search engines have gotten better (deeper map integration and scraped business details make directories useless).

Reflecting this,traffic to Local Connect’s website is so low that SimilarWeb doesn’t track it.

Yet Agora Advantage would have you believe listing on Local Connect is worth $5900 a year.

Agora Advantage also offer a press-release spam service. As above, this is purportedly worth $12,000 a year.

Press-release marketing spam is typically used by businesses with nothing going on to create the illusion something is going on.

Outside of BehindMLM, typically to confirm an executive appoint or launch of some sort, I never find myself reading press-releases. Nobody does.

But uh yeah, $12,000 a year. One could make the argument that putting releases together is a good chunk of that cost – but that depends on how many releases you’re getting across the year.

Then there’s “Business Locator”.

The Agora Business Locator crawls the web for businesses that fit your search criteria. Here we extract their phone, emails, Google My Business info (Including review ratings), Yelp info (Including ratings), we also find their Linkedin, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and check to see if their website is SSL secured & mobile friendly. Please Keep in mind it only retrievers the data that has been published by the Business.

You just Google this stuff on your own… or for some reason pay Agora Advantage $7000 a year because lol?

It feels like Agora Advantage was set up and hasn’t had much done to it in the way of innovation.

As a marketing service, this puts a bit of a question mark on the retail viability of the Business Packages.

That press-release spam service I mentioned before? It’s the only difference between the Market Dominator and Market Accelerator packages – yet they have a $600 a month difference between them.

In 2024 is press-release spam really worth $600 a month?

Agora Advantage’s MLM opportunity is straightforward: Sell the company’s products and get paid. Recruit others and get paid on your downline’s sales.

Unfortunately there’s no differentiation between retail and recruited affiliate sales (note Agora Advantage refer to affiliates as “Member Advisors” and customers (retail or recruited affiliates) as “Members”):

A Member Advisor may also opt to join as a Member under their own personal account to take advantage for themselves the savings on products and services.

This opens the door for Agora Advantage to be marketed as a tool to market the MLM opportunity. You recruit people who use Agora Advantage to market it, with the aim of recruiting others who do the same.

This is typical of marketing tool MLM opportunities. Given the scope of services Agora Advantage are selling though, isn’t a major concern.

Still, if the majority of sales volume generated company wide is from affiliates, Agora Advantage would be operating as a pyramid scheme.

As a prospective Agora Advantage affiliate, a quick test you can do is ask your potential upline how many affiliate “members” they have versus retail customer “members”.

Anything less than a 50/50 split weighted towards more retail customers then affiliates, would indicate a pyramid scheme.

One final thought I’ll leave you with is SimilarWeb tracking only ~1600 monthly visits to Agora Advantage’s website in February 2024.

Given Agora Advantage’s whole thing is marketing, and them having complete access to their own marketing suite, makes you wonder why that figure is so low.

My personal take is that marketing on the scale Agora Advantage is fiercely competitive. If you’re looking at spending thousands a year, “in-a-box” solutions in need of a refresh probably isn’t going to cut it.