I just found this forum and thread some 18 months after my neighbors got snookered by iJango.

I must say, deftly parried, LazyMan. Well waged, sir. My hat’s off to you.

*tips hat*

Aloe Garden:

I have a friend who is in Ijango, and he’s making five figures monthly; not just on the customers who does searching the net, but build a good organization who did the same. Remember, it’s free for the customer to signed up.

Bottom line, you can money or make excuses; but you cannot do both.

However, more importantly, payment to a union is not payment to your employer. The union ensures that you get fair wages and these wages are guaranteed. iJango doesn’t guarantee any wages at all.

So it’s a really bad analogy.

all i have to say is…UNION you pay to work there dont you?

You people supporting this, you are either fully aware that iJango is a waste of time and money except for those on top of course, or you are naive and ignorant internet stats and trends.

I’ll try to make it easy for you to understand. Learn what Google page rank is. Learn what an Alexa rating is. Then check out iJango.com’s web stats.

iJango has been around for how long? And its traffic is pretty pathetic for a “search engine”, ain’t it?

Do you realize LazyMan’s blog has a higher page rank and more unique visitors than iJango does?

I bring up this argument because some of you are comparing it to Google, Bing, Yahoo, and saying that these companies make billions off of everyone using them without repaying a cent.

That is true. You use their search engines for free and they make money off the advertising. Those dollars go into improving search results constantly and if you want to make money with the big search engines, you can join their content publishing networks and get pay per click revenue, or you can invest and buy some shares in the stock market.

If iJango decided to go public and started advertising themselves as a top search engine on national TV, well then I’d say they are trying to compete with the big 3.

But don’t you understand that the people primarily using iJango are the members?

How many people do you really think use iJango because it’s “their favorite search engine”?

This model DOES NOT WORK online. It has been tried before, not just with search engines. It doesn’t work.

People, please…don’t be fools. iJango will never come close to being a top search engine. Most people will not use it because they don’t see a point in paying a startup fee or a monthly fee.

Much of the revenue generated by iJango members will be reversed because there will be a tremendous amount of click fraud from people who think they can just blindly click ads and make money off of it.

Click fraud is nearly impossible to achieve these days. ijango serves up Google ads. They are a partner. No other company has as much power and technology to combat click fraud as Google.

There’s even a good chance that iJango will eventually lose their account with Google.

I really don’t see this as a long term company in any way, shape, or form.

A direct selling model only works well when you have a good amount of people who are NOT distributors actually buying a product from the distributor to use personally. If the majority of people buying a product are the distributors themselves and the retail aspect of the product is miniscule, at best, then it’s essentially a pyramid. Monavie, Zrii, and all the other crap juices are such perfect examples of this.

You members of iJango ARE those people. And iJango IS the distributor. The product is an assortment of affiliate commissions and PPC revenue.

You are actually the 3rd party in this. Anyone who is NOT a member of iJango and uses it through your link becomes a 4th party. Minus the click fraud and affiliate fraud that is bound to happen, how much revenue do you really stand to make?

You’re better off writing a few good articles on something you know or are passionate about, and posting them on Associated Content, Squidoo, or Hubpages, and then getting a revenue share from them. Your articles will get way more traffic and clicks, and you don’t have to pay a dime nor do you have to defend yourselves all the time.

Paying anyone for the chance to earn a commission is just ridiculous.

Let’s look at how people are compensated – after paying a whopping $249.95, you have the opportunity to make back part of the initial investment by earning the right to a “recruitment” fee for head hunting members into your community who in turn recruit members also, bonuses paid on active members you’ve personally recruited for each month they remain active (i.e those who have earned the right to collect commissions), shopping commissions from those you have recruited below yourself bonuses paid when you introduce businesses to advertise on the site and monthly commissions as long as the business continues to advertise.

Clearly, it wouldn’t be easy for people to source the business of a small company or business and convince them to invest in the scheme – not on a consistent basis anyway. Most people don’t like selling and it’s not something everyone was born to do in any event.

Apart from the above, all of the remaining bonuses appear to relate to the recruitment of other members into your community and it is this behaviour that the compensation plan encourages – what easier way is there to recoup the initial investment fee than to recruit an active member into your community (a nice $100.00 to the CD!).

If I were thinking of investing in anything like this, I’d ensure I’d educated myself on what a pyramid scheme precisely was BEFORE handing over any money to anyone. The FTC provides some very useful guides as to identifying a legitimate MLM company as opposed to a pyramid scheme (www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/invest/inv08.shtm or http://www.ftc.gov/speeches/other/dvimf16.shtm).

Some of the red flags include the focus of recruitment rather than selling, whether the plan is designed to make more money by recruiting rather than sales that are made, whether commissions are offered for recruiting new people, whereby advancement is achieved by recruitment rather than appointment, the requirement make purchases or ongoing fees in exchange for the right to earn commissions from those recruited.

The first thing that catches your eye is the “member gathering bonus” – you couldn’t get anymore blatant regarding the issue of recruitment than that and this is, as stated by the FTC – “a time tested tip-off to a pyramid scheme”.

There are reasons why these schemes are illegal – it’s a fraudulent business model where it’s mathematically pre-determined that the vast majority of participants will lose (greater than 90%). If it looks like a pyramid, if it operates like a pyramid – it’s probably safe to assume that it is.

Don’t even get me started on the dubious history of the iJango founders – a HUGE red flag in itself and probably a good enough reason not to invest!

Be Well
Jamie

I agree with you Pam Brown was off her rocker to imply that people should drop Chrome and IE for the EOS Browser. I’m a Firefox fan myself (you can see other pro-Firefox posts on this site).

However, Jamie, you are more off your rocker when you say that I suggested every company have “totally unique and unduplicatable product” No one suggested anything of the sort. It is good that Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Opera all push each other create better products. Don’t confuse this with iJango taking an existing browser (Firefox) and forking it into a very slightly version (EOS). It’s not like Honda grabs a Ford car, slaps some new paint on it and calls it a Honda. That’s what iJango is doing with Firefox.

Mozilla made their product open to extension for a reason. Most of the Google Chrome browser (who the previous commenter condemned) is also open and extensible. Even Internet Explorer can be extended. My point is that Pam Brown shouldn’t get on her high horse about people making these products (Microsoft and Google developers) and getting paid for their efforts. Pam Brown should not give iJango some great amount of love for leveraging millions of Mozilla’s man-hours of work… and adding a small few of their own (Mozilla’s XUL is easy to skin, I’ve done it). If anything Pam Brown should be really, really upset at iJango that the EOS browser can not be used without an iJango account (I tried to download it a few weeks back and couldn’t use it). Also iJango doesn’t credit Mozilla openly on the EOS Browser pages (that I could see). In fact, this post says that iJango may have acted illegally in removing all the licensing from Firefox to make EOS.

I fear that critical updates to Firefox will not be applied to EOS and the “top flight IT team of iJango.” From that person’s complaint (see previous link) we can see that EOS has been out since version 3.5.7 of Firefox, but EOS is still at version 1.0. It doesn’t look like EOS has been rebuilt to version 3.6.3.

It speaks volumes that no one has spoken to the nature of having to pay a huge one-time fee and monthly subscription in order to be part of the pyramid scheme.

It’s intersting to see how defenders of pyramid scheme MLMs always use these few examples of halfway-reputable MLMs but then go as far as to say that there are thousands of companies such as these. In fact, if you were to prepare a list of a thousand of the most notable MLMs (assuming that you could find that many) it would have to include some of the worst companies that ever existed; many of which would have been shutdown by regulatory authorities or simply disappeared.

The examples cited above are the exceptions to the rule. I don’t know much about I-Jango yet, but I know a fallacious argument when I see one, and if you are going to use such weak, distorted arguments to defend I-Jango, it says to me that I-Jango is a scam. It may not be, but your arguments sure don’t help prove it to be reputable or viable; quite the contrary.

While I do appreciate all the praise, it doesn’t take much business acumen to see that a product-based pyramid-scheme like iJango is mathematically unsustainable.

Peace and good will to you!
- Jamie

Since I’m the only one who can update posts, it sounds like you are directly this to me but addressing me as OP… that’s an abbreviation I am not familiar with.

As far as I could tell Chris didn’t answer the question as to whether Community Directors can get the title for free. As I asked in the last comment, “Does iJango still charge money to earn multilevel commissions? That’s the issue that needs to be fixed. Don’t charge people money to earn commissions in helping you promote your product.”

I will answer the question myself: Community Directors are billed as a “one time fee of $249.95 and a required monthly fee of $19.95.”

Any iJango supporters would be wise to drop this. I’m not that interested in exposing the iJango scam now. I’m having enough fun exposing the MonaVie scam. I highly recommend you read the history there.

That’s called direct selling and Tupperware, Avon, Mary Kay, Pampered Chef and thousands of other companies promote their products this way.

Have you checked out the free user site yet like Chris suggested at ijango.com or are you still basing your arguments on your old information from the original post?

Your argument would be more effective if you updated the post with recent findings.