Biggest disappointment of 2007
Written on December 30, 2007 – 10:35 pm | by admin
As the year is coming to an end, everybody always talks about the success and failures of the last 12 months. As usual, many new services were announced in 2007 promising to make webmasters rich or explode the traffic to their online properties. I won’t bother discussing any of the myriad of new ebooks and scam websites that promise cheap traffic that never converts and is likely to get you banned from AdSense (of course, they never tell you the latter two.) Instead, I won’t to mention the one service that in my opinion was hyped far too much and massively failed to deliver.
What service am I talking about? I am talking about John Reese’s Blog Rush.
Blog Rush was advertised as a free service that is “the fastest and easiest way to instantly drive a flood of targeted readers to your blog.” In fact, Blog Rush is advertised as “a powerful service that works to exponentially grow your blog’s traffic.” Some of these claims were true and some blatantly false.
The facts that Blog Rush is free and easy to use are basically the only statements about the service that are correct. The claims about exponential growth of blog traffic was nothing but a pipe dream. And for anyone who spent a few minutes to think about how Blog Rush works, then this would have been obvious. At the end of the day, Blog Rush is nothing but a glorified version of the once popular banner exchanges. You display the widget and for each impression you generate your latest blog post title is shown in other people’s sites that also display the Blog Rush widget. Makes sense until you realize two things. First, the click through rate for the widget is practically zero. So, unless you already have a popular blog that can generate thousands of impressions every day, your blog post is hardly ever shown and hardly ever clicked; in the end, you receive no flood of traffic as advertised. Second, the system is not fair. As I said earlier, the largest blogs, i.e., those generating thousands of impressions every day, dominated the widget. In other words, the system was biased towards the most popular bloggers who don’t need all that traffic to begin with. The small guys were pushed aside once again.
I won’t even bother to mention the circus that was the Blog Rush launch (multiple delays and continues promises that the service will be available in the next few hours and so on) and the re-design of much of the site less than a month after that due to the immediate abuse of the system by clever hackers and shady webmasters.
Finally, I want to mention a few of the runner ups for the worst service of 2007. First, it is the downfall of AuctionAds. A service that Jeremy Schoemaker started and grew too large too fast and in the end practically imploded under its own weight. When it was finally sold to Media Whiz (owner of the very popular Text-Link-Ads,) things just became worse so fast that I don’t even know if anyone still uses AuctionAds on their site. Second, I want to mention the poor performance of ShoppingAds by the same people who purchased AuctionAds. Although, ShoppingAds is still in closed beta, it is riddled with problems and it will probably require a lot of effort before it is useful to anyone serious about making money online. Last, but not least, is WidgetBucks who decided to drop all the non-English customers several weeks after launching and enjoying their traffic. WidgetBucks is another example of a service that tried to do too much too fast and failed. I hope those who think of starting a Web 2.0 monetization service for webmasters be more careful in 2008and not repeat the mistakes of Blog Rush, AuctionAds, ShoppingAds, and WidgetBucks.
That said, I wish all of you a happy new year with lots of online earnings.
