Last weekend, everyone who was blogging about blogging was blogging about Blogrush, begging their readers to sign up through them. Why? Because Blogrush is a new “traffic-generating” widget for bloggers that relies on the users to try to sign up other users, in a sort of Multi-Level Marketing setup. The way it seems to work is that you earn “credits” by the impressions your own site generates, plus the sites of anyone you get to sign up under you, down through 10 tiers of users.
My own feeling about this is that only the ‘A-list sites ‘ who already have a lot of people visiting will benefit from BlogRush’s pyramid structure. I’ve already seen a lot of people complaining that, as smaller blogs, they aren’t getting the traffic they expected (read:none), whereas some of the big boys are saying they’ve earned tons of credits, but the system is so new BlogRush can’t yet process all those hundreds of thousands of impressions they’ve been promised.
And also, once people get used to seeing the BlogRush widget on every site they go to, they’ll tune it out. They all look alike, and I’ve already stopped noticing them, after just a few days. This can happen just as easily with Google Adsense and other ads, but at least with Adsense you can customize it to either blend it with your site, or make it stand out, whereas the BlogRush widget is identical on every site.
I personally don’t think it’s going to live up to the hype. When the smaller blogs see that they aren’t getting any traffic, they’ll remove the cumbersome, ugly widget. When the A-listers that they signed up with aren’t reaping benefits from their signees anymore, how is this better than BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog? In fact it isn’t, and I can tell you that I only get a very small percentage of my traffic from either of those two sources.
The moral of the story here is not that BlogRush is evil. In fact, I’m sure they’ll get the early bugs sorted out and perhaps add some functionality that their users will value and enjoy.
The moral of the story is that we, as bloggers, need to curb the impulse to jump on bandwagons. Be a free-thinker and use your best judgement. Then if you still want to write a blog post promoting the exact same service that 1289083103802 other bloggers are posting about on that very same day, feel free.
September 22nd, 2007 at 6:23 am
Amen to that! I have had my doubts about this blogrush thing all along. I must say however, when I see it on someone’s sidebar, I do click on at least one ‘headline’ that I found interesting. Have I found anything interesting? Every now and then, just for a good momentary ‘read’ but nothing yet that I would put in my Google Reader.
September 28th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
First i thought it will bring traffic or not, but its working some sort fine and i hope it will work much better.
October 1st, 2007 at 3:32 am
I really like the idea of BlogRush, and I hope it succeeds, but I’m having doubts. All pyramid schemes fall apart eventually.
I’m looking forward to the ‘dashboard’ becoming available again. I’d like to know exactly how many times I’ve displayed this thing vs. how many people it has brought in (about 50 to date).