The Death of BlogRush

Posted by damnedviper | | 2 comments »

 If you dont know about BlogRush then Here is some info for you.

BlogRush is a free service that was created to help bloggers solve their #1 need:
More Readers For Their Blog.
By adding the BlogRush Widget to a blog, a blogger can get instant distribution for their latest blog post titles across a network of related blogs.
BlogRush users earn "syndication credits" (the right to have their blog post titles shown inside a widget on another related blog) based on their own traffic (loads of the widget) as well as the traffic of other users they refer to BlogRush. Users can automatically refer others to BlogRush via special links on the widget, as well as through the promotion of a special referral URL they are given.
BlogRush is a "Cooperative Syndication Network" that rewards its users for their contributions to the network -- from the impressions they provide of the BlogRush Widget to the referral of other users through 10 'generations' of activity and the impressions of the widget that they provide. BlogRush was designed to be incredibly viral and to provide its users with tremendous distribution leverage to receive exposure for their blog content (onto related content blogs) that they could never achieve on their own; at least without a massive advertising budget.
BlogRush is the brainchild of Internet entrepreneur, John Reese. Mr. Reese is the founder and CEO of Income.com, a soon to be launched social network and media company for entrepreneurs. BlogRush is the first Web property of the Income.com Network, a network of sites and services to help entrepreneurs and business owners succeed. Income.com is based in Orlando, Florida.
They are closing down because of not able to assure the quality of their service and suffering a low click rate. despite having couple of million impressions a day. Here is the email which they are sending out to their users:
To: All BlogRush Users
After careful consideration, we have decided to shutdown the BlogRush service.  If you have the widget code on your blog you will need to remove it.
When BlogRush launched in late-2007 it spread like wildfire all over the Web.  Thousands of bloggers were talking about it and the service exploded to become one of the fastest growing free services in the history of the Web.  During the first year of the service it successfully served 3.4 Billion blog post headlines and the BlogRush widget could be found on blogs all over the world; even up until the moment we closed down the service.
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.
Our team worked very hard to try and build a service that would truly help bloggers of all sizes get free traffic to their blogs.  This was our primary focus.  Not once did we ever try to monetize the service with ads or anything else.  BlogRush never made a single penny in revenue.  We wanted to be able to help our users FIRST and then worry about monetizing the service later.
Unfortunately, the service didn’t work out like we had hoped.  (It happens.)
I want to say “Thank You” to all of the great bloggers that at least gave BlogRush a test to see if it would work for them.  We sincerely appreciate you giving the service a try.     We have received several offers & inquiries about acquiring BlogRush, but we are choosing not to go that route.  While many might think this is crazy, we truly feel it’s the ‘right’ thing to do for our users.  Believe it or not, it’s not always about the money.  In fact, BlogRush will have lost a small fortune when it’s all said and done, and it was by choice.
There were many things we could have done to monetize the service but we wanted to make sure it was going to benefit our users first.
Last but not least I want to say that I hope the failure of this service doesn’t in any way discourage other entrepreneurs from coming up with crazy ideas at 4AM (like I did with this one) and from “going for it” to just try and see if something will work.
Without trying there can be no success.  And as we all know, ideas are worthless without action. The Web wouldn’t be what it is today without entrepreneurs trying all sorts of crazy ideas.
On behalf of the entire BlogRush team, we wish the best of luck to everyone with their own blogs, ideas, and crazy ventures.
Sincerely,
John Reese
http://twitter.com/johnreese
I had used their service for sometime but later abandoned it. Sad to hear this news though but this is a right step at their part because its the quality of service and user satisfaction which should be the priority of the companies.

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2 comments

  1. Anonymous // November 2, 2008 at 8:20 AM  

    I have red about blogrush sometimes back and couldn't go for it that time. Now i happened to see your blog and read about the close down of the services.
    Is there any such nice services you can recommend? Please feel free to comment in my blog

  2. Anonymous // November 21, 2008 at 3:22 AM  

    Ya.

    I read John Reese's blog post on income.com. He is quite sad to see one of his baby down too. I'm not getting much traffic from it. So, I think that's a good way to stop more negative impact.

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