“Common sense right off the top would tell me that the list is off though – Xango has been out for many many years and there is no way that they have the most momentum built up. They are no where near many of the newer companies that have not only improved on “superfruit” products but improved the compensation plans as well.”

Here’s my response:
Are you sure you want to rely on information compiled as loosely and subjectively as the MLM Top 500 Momentum list claims to be: “…based on Internet research, company revenues, interviews, company conventions, company websites, direct selling magazines, and through our reporters.”? What does that actually mean?

Speaking of common sense…while I’m not a proponent of any particular company, just because a company is established doesn’t mean they can’t be experiencing momentum. There is a difference between “generating” momentum and “experiencing” momentum. Of course a new company will be going through all sorts of launch activities, but if that doesn’t cause a lot of people to look into them…they aren’t experiencing momentum, they are simply “trying” to generate it.

Momentum is also not automatically caused by a company having a new super-fruit concoction or compensation plan formulation. Remember the old adage, “if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make any sound?”

I do agree with your point that not all searching or site visits are positive. Some searches could be driven by curiosity for negative reasons. In a future analysis it might be interesting for me to look at search keywords that accompany the company or product keywords to see if they reflect a negative purpose.

It is an interesting approach, but I am dubious how closely web-searches can be tied to the physical growth of a company. When people search for information about a company (and in this case an MLM) it could be for any number of reasons – not all of them positive.

In the case of XanGo, I am not surprised at your results, but I suspect that the actual company size (distributor count) has been static over the past 12 months. While there has been an amazing amount of web-advertising due to a new product-line and expansion into Russia, a lot of former distributors have hung up their towels and moved on to other things.

In the three months before Russia’s opening was officially announced, at least five independent websites, and countless blogs, dedicated to XanGo were created in Russia (but hosted in the USA) – I am sure this would have affected your numbers as well…

Having said that, I found your article interesting, and I will be back again.