BlogRush has announced that they have decided to close their doors. BlogRush was a service that enabled bloggers to share traffic with each other by displaying a widget on their blog that showcased headlines from other blogs writing about the same subjects. Back in 2007 when the service was first launched, it spread amongst the blogging world like wildfire. In fact, I remember seeing a ton of blogs jumping on board to display the widget to cash in on the promises of extra traffic.
I reviewed the service on September 17th 2007 on my personal site (BlogRush What Is This New Buzzword) and then followed up that post describing my actual experience with using the service (Is The BlogRush Over With). Basically, I explained how I didn’t see a rush of traffic as the service promised and thus, I tossed it in the can only after five days of use.
John Reese who is the founder of BlogRush notes a few of the issues which caused the closure:
BlogRush didn’t grow without its fair share of problems — from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected. We also had some problems with trying to fairly control the quality of the network, and in the process made many mistakes in deciding what blogs should stay or go. All of these issues, ultimately, limited the service’s full potential.
However, it is impressive that BlogRush served 3.4 billion blog post headlines through its widget during the first year.
In my personal opinion, BlogRush was setup in such a way that only the big blogs who had high traffic levels to begin with were the only ones who benefited from displaying the widget on their site. Other services with a similar idea as BlogRush have come and gone, such as CLIQ.
Lets face it, no one is ever going to get a large amount of traffic simply by displaying a widget tied to a service. It takes good quality content to drive traffic and this rule of thumb will never change.
Did you use BlogRush? If so, tell us about your experience in the comments.
8 thoughts on “BlogRush Joins The Deadpool”
I just remember to check if Blogrush still exists and lol it was down. So this is a fail project of marketing expert John Reese? I still remember how JR made the hype words on the newsletter, it concludes that Marketing = BS.
I submitted 2 blogs to them. Both were rejected right away.
So I went elsewhere. The Blog Catalog community is much
more friendly. It has not been a great loss.
Carma can be so sweet sometimes.
I haven’t tried it, but I remember when it came out. I’m not surprised that it is closing its doors, but I can’t fault the scope or the idea. It’s always good for people to try new things (or is it new people try old things) because we cannot truly predict success or failure until we try.
Like the others, I tried Blog Rush when it first appeared. Carefully checking my log files, I think I got about three visitors from BR over a several week period. I concluded it wasn’t worth my time, especially when I watched numerous big-name bloggers drop BR from their sites.
I have occasionally seen the BR widget on blogs I visit, but the number of BR Widgets I see has fallen off drastically from the days when the service started out.
I have gotten far more traffic and interaction from EntreCard, even though I have not had time to do much with it lately. I have “met” many other bloggers through EC, as they either leave a comment or send me a message through the EC dashboard. I don’t think I received any reaction from BlogRush.
In the end, I think this was a major part of the BR failure. In an era of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Entrecard and other services that offer a means to interact with others, BR was little more than an ad trading program, with no social impact whatsoever.
Goodbye, BlogRush. I’m very surprised that you hung on this long.
Just offering a different perspective, but maybe the lack of success is due to the limitations of textual headlines. If you are on a blog that you know or ‘kinda know’ are you going to click on a widget text headline link to go somewhere you know even less? Probably not.
Furthermore, consider how un-engaging text link ads in a sidebar really are. As I write this, if I look to the right I see a set of 2 125×125 ad images. Those ads are not just a text link, they are a graphic ad banner because graphics engage people to click more than a link does.
I’m sure that the things that John Reese mentioned contributed to the failure, but don’t neglect to consider the actual product execution.
I used BlogRush when it first came out, for about a week. Then they had their big purge of sites that did not meet their “quality guidelines”. What a joke that was. I took it off right after that, since I apparently did not meet their level of “quality”. Sure I might not post gold every post but it was a heck of a lot better than some of the blogs on the network. Not to mention I kept getting adult blog posts on a family oriented blog. Not good.
I won’t cry over BlogRush being gone.
I used Blog Rush on one of my “test” blogs and got “dumped” by them because – well, I have no idea why the blog got dumped by them.
As for me, I am VERY leary of anything that promised BIG GAIN with NO INVESTMENT OF TIME OR MONEY, which is how Blog Rush was promoted.
The thing is, blogs with LOTS of traffic didn’t need the widget – which meant the widget was displayed on thousands of blog with very little traffic who weren’t willing to do what it takes to CREATE traffic.
Why am I NOT surprised this didn’t work.
I was not getting good results with BlogRush and took it off my blog a few months ago.
I get better results with Entrecard since people tend to stay longer.
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