BlogBurst

» see blogburst.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 2006 every newspaper in America had worked out that blogs were where the traffic was going and none of them wanted to hire bloggers. BlogBurst sold the obvious solution. Pluck, an Austin company that had spent the previous year on an RSS reader nobody used, built a machine that screened and categorized submitted feeds, then pushed the posts out to publishers who paid by the thousand impressions.

Recruiting started in late February and the service opened properly on 2 May 2006. By then there were a thousand applications in and around fifteen hundred blogs accepted, with the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post already carrying the feeds. Reuters put seven million dollars into Pluck later that year and agreed to run the blogs itself. USA Today took it when the site was redesigned. By 2007 the marketing had a number on it: more than 3,400 blogs, the largest syndication network of its kind.

None of the bloggers were paid. That was not an oversight or a launch condition that got fixed later. It was the product.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the bargain ~

What a blogger handed over was a full-text RSS feed plus a signature on an agreement granting Pluck a non-exclusive worldwide royalty-free perpetual license to make derivative works of everything in it. What a blogger got back was a link. The revenue share on the ads ran between the publisher and Pluck, and the terms said in as many words not to expect money.

This was still a defensible trade in 2006, when a link from the Washington Post was a real asset and the traffic it sent was worth more than any check that network would have written. It is also why the whole thing was legible only from inside American media. The value on offer was a byline on a US metro daily's website, which meant nothing at all to anyone whose readers were somewhere else.

~ the backlash ~

By May 2006, three weeks after launch, the bloggers had numbers of their own. BlogBurst was quoting click-through rates of fifteen to thirty percent. Jonathan Bailey, who ran Plagiarism Today and was in the network, measured his at one percent. The syndicated copies hotlinked images straight off the original blog, which meant the publisher served the article and the blogger paid for the bandwidth.

The perpetual license was the part that would not settle. Anyone publishing under a Creative Commons non-commercial license was in direct conflict with it, and the agreement left Pluck deciding forever what counted as an acceptable commercial use. Bailey left over exactly that. The complaint got loud enough to have its own name for a while, and the network kept growing through all of it, which says something about how many people wanted the link.

~ moving day ~

Demand Media bought Pluck on 3 March 2008 for seventy-five million dollars in cash. Demand at that point was building eHow alongside the freelance mill called Demand Media Studios, and a network of three thousand blogs willing to work for exposure fit that shape better than it had ever fit Reuters.

The archive dates the ending to within a week. On 9 October 2010 blogburst.com was still the syndication network. On 15 October the page read "BlogBurst is Moving... We found a new home with our friends over at Demand Media Studios," with a line underneath telling existing members that maybe they had missed the email, and if so to write to [email protected] with their blog URL so somebody could explain what happened to their account.

That notice sat on the domain for three more years without changing. By mid-2014 it had degraded to a bare redirect page reading Object moved. The address now serves a registrar dispute notice asking whoever owns it to confirm their contact details.

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