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Despite Recent Criticism, Blogrush Means Business

Blogrush means business - John Reese speaks out against those who have been gaming the system.

Unless you’ve been under a rock in a cave on an uninhabited island lately, you’ve surely heard all of the press that Blogrush has been getting. If you’ve installed the Blogrush widget on your blog, you’ve probably seen stats where you have tons of impressions but only a handful of clicks. So by this point, you may have written Blogrush off as hype.

People have offered some basic tips on how to convert more eyeballs: keep your titles short enough to fit in on one line, keep your posts in English, etc – but it has become clear that there are folks that are gaming the system.

Well, let’s just say that the Blogrush folks aren’t too happy about this. The latest message from John Reese, their CEO, states:

“…And a quick word to any ‘cheats’ that might be reading this letter… it’s very possible that you may come up with something extremely creative that temporarily gets by us, but you should know something… IT’S NOT GOING TO BE WORTH YOUR TIME. And I’m not just talking about the tiny amount of traffic that you’ll receive before we shut you off.

You see, we have other plans in the works…

If you attempt to cheat or abuse our network in anyway, shape, or form, we will not hesitate to come after you. Our company is well funded and has plenty of resources. And we WILL use them to punish you to the fullest extent of the law (and civil court process). Oh, you think you can just hide behind some anonymous proxy IPs? Sorry, it’s not that easy. ANY reason you’d have to try and cheat the BlogRush network for traffic and any attempt you make to monetize that traffic will lead directly to your front door — whether it’s AdSense, any affiliate program in the world, any online pharmacy, porn site, casino… ANYTHING. We will follow the trail and it WILL eventually lead to you.

Our hard-working company provides the income for MANY families. As
the CEO of our company, I take this very seriously. I HAVE TO.
People that attempt to abuse or cheat BlogRush are affecting the livelihood of all my employees and their families. And I will do everything in my power to protect them — it’s MY DUTY.

So for all you cheaters that joined BlogRush and had your fun trying to siphon off some traffic, hopefully it was fun. And I’ll go ahead and make this statement right now… IF you were one of the people that has been cheating our network I’m going to give you ONE opportunity… quit now and we’ll pretend it never happened. I think that’s more than fair.

BUT… if you continue after this point, all bets are off. We WILL eventually discover what you’re doing, where you’re trying to send
traffic, and we will prosecute you. I GUARANTEE IT. Sorry, but WE
HAVE NO CHOICE NOW.”

Those are some pretty strong statements. After seeing the poor conversion rate and equally poor blog titles appearing my widget, I had initially taken down the Blogrush widget. After seeing this bold statement from them, I’ve decided to put it back in again. We’ll see how things turn out.

11 Comments

  1. Andy Beard

    John Reese is a very serious guy in everything he undertakes and probably knows the owners of many CPA networks.

    There is always going to be a limit to how much traffic any one widget is going to deliver, after all have you ever studied the CTR through to your own categories?

  2. brian

    @andy: good comments. It does seem that John will see Blogrush changes through so that we may start to see better conversion rates.

    And yes, each widget serves a different purpose. Some are to help build or promote one’s profile (i.e. LinkedIn, StumbleUpon), while others to show one’s traffic (Alexa, pagerank, Sitemeter).

    Lots of other companies have had a similar idea of what Blogrush is doing right now and have claimed to bring in more traffic such as Spicypage and Blogskinny.

    CTR definitely changes based on the type of categories that you are talking about. A mortgage site is going to have a whole different CTR than a humor site.

  3. Dan

    Wow, strong statement indeed. You might disagree, but its statements like these that turn me off to a service or company. Instead of resorting to threats and what not, he could have stopped at “You see, we have other plans in the works…” and added a winky face, and that would have conveyed his point more effectively imho. Every company, service, or software that can’t keep a level head about people who work the system has had more important core issues to worry about than “creative” users.

    As for poor CTRs, people understand what ads are and aren’t going to click on them. Users are getting very adept at identifying Adsense and PPC ads.

    On the other hand, be nice. Whenever I see Google AdSense on someone’s page, I control+click one of the links, keep browsing the site, then close the ad tab. Next-to-little effort for me, a couple tenths of a penny for the site admin.

  4. brian

    @dan: yes, it was a strong message. Was it over the top? Perhaps. But there is no question of where he stands on the topic.

    Yes, many people don’t click on ads. Unless they are relevant. But these aren’t ads – they are other’s blog posts.

    Not sure if I agree on clicking on other people’s ads to be nice, but hey, that’s your choice.

  5. Aaron

    He also might have prodded people into just screwing with the network for the principle. If you’re not gaining anything (traffic or money) from an exploit like that then his “…we will follow the trail” statement flies out the window.

  6. cubus

    Strong statement indeed. But ONE THING I KNOW is that since is subscribed to their service (and added the widget to my blog) I started to receive SPAM EMAILS. So maybe they do have strong service commitments but maybe they also should RESPECT their users privacy.

    Personally I also DON’T LIKE when people are using capitals to MAKE THEIR POINT.

    The traffic I received – for a small blog I have – wasn’t that bad though.

  7. brian

    @aaron: good point. If you invite people looking for trouble, you just might get it. No need to make people upset like that.

    @cubus: yes, I’m not a big fan of caps, either. I posted the excerpt of the letter just because I found it so unusual. When you write a letter like that, you’re really putting yourself out on the line.

  8. CHESSNOID

    Hi, I found your site from your old site via stumbleupon. I had the blogrush widget up but just didn’t get any traffic from it. Then when I got the long winded email why it wasn’t working, blah, blah, blah, I just took it down. They promised big things and didn’t deliver after the initial buzz died from lack of performance. How is it working for you now. Would you recommend me putting it back up?

  9. brian

    @chessnoid: I appreciate you following over to the new blog! As far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out for Blogrush. I have been seeing a couple of referrers from them from time to time, but their stats are still down.

  10. MaxBlogPress

    I recently developed a free wordpress plugin called “BlogRush Click Maximizer”. By using it you can vastly improve your Click Through Rate.

    This allows you to control what you want to display in BlogRush. You can even write alternate – short and catchy title just for BlogRush.

    You will have total control of what appears over the BlogRush Network.

    Check it out here:
    https://www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/bcm/

  11. brian

    @maxblogpress: cool, we’ll have to check it out.