Archive for: blogrush

BlogRush Goes Six Feet Under

During these turbulent times there has been a lot of change across the economic landscape. Companies from big to small, brick and mortar to online sites have all experienced the crunch. Many are comparing these times to the dotcom bust years ago, if history is cyclical this was a short rotation.

Recently BlogRush has decided to close it’s “doors” and fade away. In an announcement by John Reese, BlogRush was suffering from lack of clicks, and users who no longer wanted to be advertised to. While that may come as a no brainer to the typical user, BlogRush prided itself on being unobtrusive and focusing on the needs and wants of the users.

Was this truly what BlogRush stood for? The site definitely had its fair share of critics. For example, Seopedia sticks out in my mind after they were so amazingly rejected by the site. You can read their entire ordeal here. Basically it appear that BlogRush depended on random people to be the judges of whether a site fit the criteria or not. The advertisement that was sent out by owner John Reese seems to focus less on quality judges, and more on mass quantity.

Mashable has a more scathing post from late 2007 where they say BlogRush was a throwback to the Web 1.0 era. They explain the process of earning credits by using their widget on your site, and sharing traffic with other sites increasing exposure and ranking within the network. He compares the concept to that of a pyramid scheme.

Despite the critics, John Reese stands by his product and claims that he is a risk taker. He admits that as an entrepreneur he has had some ideas succeed and some fail, but his success stems from not being afraid to try. He goes on to say that BlogRush was offered a “small fortune” but that he reluctantly turned it down to keep the purity of the idea. Not sure if I necessarily agree with the decision, but regardless, the site is down for the count.

It’s advised that users remove the BlogRush widgets from their pages because they are no inactive. So while click rates dropped, and BlogRush has come to an end, John Reese promises that he will continue to strive with new online ideas, and look to continue his innovative streak.

You can read the entire letter to users here.

TrafficJam: From The Makers of BlogRush

TrafficJam.com is the new product from Income.com, which also makes BlogRush. TrafficJam is a new aggregator service that collaborates data from the BlogRush Network and provides the headlines of the biggest news stories within the network.

TrafficJam.com uses technology to analyze the click-through rates of millions of blog post titles across the BlogRush Network, along with other factors such as time spent on a particular blog entry’s page, and attempts to estimate the ‘popularity’ and ‘quality’ of certain posts based on similar data from other blog posts of the same topic.

I think this is quite a fun tool, but does nothing of any substance. The BlogRush network doesnt really bring in traffic like it was reported when the network first started, and most of the major blogs in the network have dropped the widget. Thus, I see TrafficJam as a site that will never gain much traffic because it is backed onto the wrong network.

BlogRush Showing a Positive Result

As most of you have noticed i added BlogRush to our sidebar. Yesterday BlogRush finally got their stats section online and it has show some very good results so far. Crenk’s amount of traffic has doubled in the last 2 days and from what i can see this is from BlogRush. It works quite simply, when the BlogRush widget is viewed on your website your link will be show on the widget on someone elses website. Thus providing links on other sites we would not normally receive and thus giving the opportunity for visitors to clicks and visit our site. Brilliant idea!