What's Happening with AdGateWorld and Ad-Ventures4U Social Advertising

Social Advertising has been an interesting and rapidly growing forum for increasing exposure to web sites and blogs, as well as create weekly revenue through the revered profit-sharing structure.

Two of the more popular sites I am actively participating in are AdGateWorld and Ad-Ventures4U. Both businesses are less than a year old and both currently seem to be having growing pains.

Let's begin with AdGate.


AdGateWorld
This group officially launched January 2009 after several months of prelaunch buzz. I joined as a free member in November 2008 and began tracking them, and invested money in the spring. The group seemed to be running pretty well and offered great promotions up until the upgrades they did earlier this summer.

The new look and feel of the site after their upgrades was nice. They credited back all monies, including bonus money from upgrades and promotions, as a way of saying "thank you" to their loyal followers. The pay structure they were implementing looked good too, as it would offer higher compensation for revenue sharing.

Also the various areas this group launched, such as AdGate Classifieds, and the ever developing AdGate Finance and GateScout, are added bonuses to members as a way to connect with others, share information and opportunities, and generally gain insight and knowledge.

During the upgrade period, the site was down for roughly a week. It came back online and everything seemed to look pretty solid.

About a week later, this group announced new management was acquiring and taking over all aspects of AdGateWorld, but assured us they would take the business to the next level and not much would change.

Offline, I am a business broker. So that critical side of me kicked in upon this news. As a business broker, as well as to prospective buyers of businesses, a business less than 2 years old being sold is a HUGE red flag. Why so soon? What's the underlying reason for wanting or needing to sell? What led to the owners' decision to sell while the business is still ramping up and getting established?

If you are a member of AdGate, you are undoubtedly getting their email correspondence and seeing their updates on the "In Touch" page. They basically acknowledged earlier this week the company is running in the red and they are taking steps to fix the current financial situation.

The down side is I, and presumably many people, have not seen any revenue sharing for two weeks. That means I haven't seen rebates from my ad packs since new management took over.

The argument is that revenue is down, the promotional bonuses previously offer are dragging down the company overhead, new money coming into the organization has flat lined, and they must remain solvent. They are asking everyone to do their part to bring in new money and members so everyone will benefit going forward.

Obviously, these are solid reasons to be conservative with their cash flow, but I fear this will have the opposite effect of what they want and badly need. The longer they hold out on those of us who are actively participating in the program, surfing the required sites, and opting to roll over weekly ad rebates, the more likely people will bolt, pull their money, and stop promoting.

And so a downward spiral will go.

I truly hope this will not happen. I understand AdGate's side of the story, but also see how people will get upset if this continues much longer.

My sense is they are working through an uncomfortable growing pain and come out the other end a more secure and solid company.

My recommendation is to proceed cautiously with this group for the next month or so and see if things smooth out. If you decide to purchase new ad packs, only invest what you are comfortable spending.

If you are not a member and would like to sign up for free, click here to view the main page.

Ad-Ventures4U

This group is also upgrading their site and servers. I think this is a good thing, because it was taking forever for sites to load while doing my daily surfing.

Steve is very good about communicating to all members at least once each day about what is happening, and communication is always a good sign. :-)

It seems like they are having some problems with scripting as the current site is up but they are diligently working to launch the new "gold" site. I am not surprised by this. Upgrades always seems to take longer than expected and technological improvements invariably bring about an unanticipated snafu.

Generally I think the site is becoming easier to navigate and I look forward to seeing all the features and benefits they roll out.

The biggest problem I am personally seeing with this group surrounds the surf feature. For the last 7-10 days Ad-Ventures has added a ticker that counts down the sites remaining you must surf to qualify for the rebate.

That's great...except it almost always seems to stop and freeze up with just one site left to surf. And if I refresh? It starts the counter again! ARGH!

This week Ad-Ventures changed this ticker to count down in increments of five. Pro Members are still required to surf 25 sites each day, so we need to count how many groups of 5 sites we surf. Again, that's fine although it makes for more work keeping track of the actual number of sites surfed.

Although they haven't specifically said, I think this change might be because so many members were having trouble getting their surf credits.

The problem I encountered yesterday was that the surf page froze again twice while I had just one site left in each of the "five packs". There doesn't seem to be anything you can do about it. I hope for everyone's sake they get this glitch fixed soon and we see a smooth transition to the fully integrated new site.

Ad-Ventures is a little behind on their ad rebate compensation, but they ARE paying and are good about communicating payment status to all members.

This group has been saying their memberships are growing at a phenomenal rate and recently hit 55,000 members. We have to take their word on this and I see no reason to doubt it. Overall this group seems to be on the ball and working in good faith for everyone, and I intend to keep tracking this group.

You can sign up for a free membership or just take a look around their site by clicking here.

I continue to think Social Advertising is a positive and inexpensive way of getting exposure to one's web site. There segment will undoubtedly continue to change and grow in the future, and I intend to keep using them as a way to building income and help build my online business as well.

As always, never spend more than you can afford to lose, withdraw your seed money as soon as you can, and play with the profits/house money onward and upward.


Enjoy the rest of your summer! Until next time...