Well, the stats were bound to come in and unfortunately for BlogRush, they fell short of a “flood of targeted traffic.” In fact, they fell short of even a trickle.
Granted, I’m not one of the big guys that I wrote about in my post bringing up possible issues with the service. So, how did they do? Darren Rowse over at Problogger.net shared his statistics and they were even worse than my own! Darren’s content has been displayed roughly 70,000 times. That is of course a testiment to the kind of traffic his blog can drive and the number of referrals it can generate. So, how large was the “flood of traffic” he received? A whopping 35 visitors! Now I don’t know about you, but if that’s the kind of traffic a blog the size of Problogger receives, I’m not going to spend any time promoting the service or displaying their widget.
Not only does BlogRush have a problem with traffic, they apparently are having trouble keeping up with the number of credits people are earning. When my stats were first displayed, I had roughly 500 credits waiting to be “spent. By the time of this writing I’m at almost twice that. However, the number of times my content had been displayed has only increased by 100 or so. Again, I’m not the only one seeing this as Darren mentioned it as well. With the number of credits he’s earning on a daily basis I can only imagine the backlog in his account. If the backlog continues to grow, BlogRush could find themselves with some very unhappy members. Regardless, with the completely inept click through rate we’ve already seen, BlogRush might go down as one of the most highly promoted, flops in recent internet history.
It doesn’t really surprise me that click through rates are so low. When I go to a blog, I’m interested in seeing content from that blog, not from someone else’s. However, I’ve actually been looking for headlines/links in BlogRush that catch my interest, but sadly I haven’t seen any. How many people are there that aren’t even looking/don’t even care about the links in BlogRush…probably most of them.
It doesn’t really surprise me either, especially when you consider that most of the widgets I’ve seen were placed low on the page in less than prime real estate. Still, Probloggers ratio of 70,000 to 35 clicks is impressively bad. BlogRush should have realized going in that they’d run into this problem. I mean how many people are going to willingly give up valuable space on their site? Personally I would offer some sort of incentive for where you place it on your site but I’m not sure there’s an easy way to verify that.
Also, since they are selling off 10% of the impressions, I’m not sure they really care, so long as they get the impressions.
I just loaded my site and this text is appearing where my BlogRush widget once was.
“We are currently experiencing some technical issues and the site will be back online shortly. Please come back in a few minutes.” This isn’t looking good.
I am not surprised by the over flowing accounts problem. If the big boys are sitting with millions of credits in their accounts and they provide the majoirty of the impressions how will their stuff ever be served? You don’t want to serve it on your own site!
When you add in the pyramid scheme nature of the system you will quickly find your account full of credits that you can not spend!
I too am not surprised by the low click through rate. Another example of this is the click through rate that I get on my articles that I submit to Sphinn.com. I might get a couple of click throughs, but not that many. And in the case of Sphinn, the visitors are specifically there to see what others are blogging about. With the Blogrush widget, the vast majority of people aren’t even going to see it.
@ Andy, that doesn’t sound good at all. This honestly may turn out to be one of the biggest flame outs in recent internet history. To have done SO well with the buzz marketing it seems like such a waste.
@ Newest, my articles on Sphinn do pretty well for me and usually bring in over 100 new visitors each time I hit the front page. While that’s a lot less than say Digg, it’s 100 times more than I’ve seen from BlogRush in three days. At this rate I’d have to run BlogRush for 300 days to get the same amount of traffic as I do from a Sphinn!
I spotted the same inconsistent stat issue as well and did post it. And now highlighted by Andy, the widget is down. I guess the team didn’t stress test it enough. They could have aimed too high for the skies.
I think the NTugo Network is a better idea (www.ntugo.com/network/). I’ve been looking at it, and I head there’s going to be a WordPress plugin to add the network headlines to your sidebar. That would be cool.
It’s all back up and I am getting a big goose egg! Oh well. It was worth a try I guess. Live and learn.
@ Andy, you might want to check your stats programs like Google Analytics if you run it (if you don’t you should). BlogRush has apparently sent me about 5 visitors in actuality. However, that doesn’t make me much more comfortable with it because if they aren’t tracking a good chunk of the clicks I get, why would I think they’re accurately tracking the impressions I generate?
Man, I’m unhappy and I didn’t even join!
Besides the poor placement, I think the widget itself is just plain ugly. If it was a normal list like “Recent Comments,” I might click a link. But as it is, I don’t even glance at it to see the titles.
The way they are going now they are going to flame out unless they get their act together. Sure a pyramid scheme is attractive but in the long run its not very stable. And they need to get more than just the “internet” blogs interested.
Recently too many bloggers rushing to apply for blogrush I am one of them, hope this help to increase my blog traffic.
What I can say is, Ben you’re right ! Their traffic become slower. At least I have to wait about 5-10 minutes before the widget come to alive.
BlogRush is a good idea in theory for those at the top (shoemoney, john chow, etc) but for the overwhelming majority you’re just wasting valuable sidebar space in my opinion.
I was just doing some looking today. I clicked on some of the links in my BlogRush widget and almost 90% of the blogs that were listed on my site DID NOT have the BlogRush widget installed on their sites, ANYWHERE. How can that be? I know – this is probably beating a dead horse to death.
@ Andy, that’s because they either, a) earned more credits than BlogRush was able to pay them for in impressions before removing the widget (like I did) or b) their referrals are earning them enough credits to generate impressions.
They did just release new colors of widgets and left another note at the bottom of the page. I was tempted to write another post about it because it kind of pissed me off but so far I’ve avoided it.
I was at about 3400 impressions, with 1 click before I nailed it, and I’m pretty sure that was done by someone at blogrush. I feel like that nerd in the cafeteria where the bully says “what’s that on your shirt” and then flips you on the nose. And then does it again. In front of your dream girl. And your fly is unzipped.
@ Scott, lol I don’t think you’re even close to alone. I have been hearing that people are seeing a bit more traffic than BlogRush is reporting but as I said before, that’s not something that inspires confidence in the service either. Maybe once they address some of the glaring issues I’ll give it another try, I mean my side bar definitely has the room, so we’ll see.
Blown up by their own success maybe? This service certainly has teething problems, but I’m going to hang on in there for a while to see if it improves.
And…so far although I have a few referrals signed up, *they* don’t. Or they do and BlogRush isn’t reporting properly. Is that working for you guys?
Click through rates are pretty bad, i agree. I think that the BlogRush thing will fade out over the next month or two with a lot of people taking it off thier sites leaving behind a handful of loyals.