BlogRush

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

~ the obituary ~

BlogRush was a box of links. You signed up, pasted a snippet into your blog template, and a small panel appeared showing five recent post titles from other blogs in the network. Every time that panel loaded on your page you earned a credit, and credits bought you slots in other people's panels. Your headlines traveled outward in proportion to how much traffic you were lending inward.

It went up in September 2007 and the spread was fast enough that John Reese, who built it, was still describing it in those terms a year later: the service spread like wildfire all over the Web, thousands of bloggers talking about it, one of the fastest-growing free services he could point to. The widget turned up on blogs in every language and stayed there. It was still on them the day the lights went out.

The mechanism was not new. Banner exchanges had run on exactly this logic a decade earlier, and so had the whole etiquette of link lists on personal sites. What BlogRush added was automation and a credit ledger, so that instead of emailing a stranger to swap links you joined a market that did the swapping for you and kept score.

Turkish forum culture ran on the same instinct in the same years, though through different machinery. Signature blocks on donanimhaber and frmtr carried your hardware list and a link, and the link traveled on the back of how much you posted. The currency was participation rather than impressions, but the trade was identical: lend your attention surface to somebody else's words and they lend you theirs. BlogRush just wrote that down as an accounting system.

~ the case file ~

~ the widget ~

Two things broke it, and Reese named both in his closing letter. The click rates were much lower than expected, which is the quiet killer: a panel of five headlines from blogs you have never heard of is a thing readers learn to skip in about a week. And people gamed it, hard, because any system that converts impressions into exposure is a system with an obvious exploit and a large population of marketers who had already found it.

The response made things worse. BlogRush tried to police quality by deciding which blogs could stay in the network, and Reese admits in the same letter that they made many mistakes in deciding what blogs should stay or go. Running an exchange means you are a referee, and there is no version of refereeing a hundred thousand blogs that leaves the ejected members quiet about it.

~ a crazy idea at 4am ~

The farewell is still sitting in the archive at full length, and it ends somewhere most shutdown letters do not go. After the apologies and the thank-yous, Reese writes that he hopes the failure of the service does not discourage anyone else from coming up with crazy ideas at 4AM, as he puts it, like he did with this one, and from going for it just to see whether something will work. Without trying there can be no success. Ideas are worthless without action.

That is the voice of 2007 internet marketing preserved intact, four months into the financial crisis, on the front page of a product that had just gone under. The Next Web's writeup at the time read the closure as a verdict on the whole Web 2.0 playbook: grow first, monetize later, except there was no later any more.

~ no revenue, by choice ~

The detail that makes BlogRush worth a stone is the money, and specifically the absence of it. Reese states it flatly: not once did they try to monetize the service with ads or anything else, and BlogRush never made a single penny in revenue. A widget on hundreds of thousands of blogs, 3.4 billion headline impressions in a year, and no ad unit anywhere in it. He says they wanted to help users first and worry about revenue later.

Then the part that gets stranger the longer you look at it. Several people offered to buy BlogRush on the way down, and he turned them all down, on the grounds that selling it was not the right thing to do for the users. He acknowledges that many will think this is crazy. He also says, in the same breath, that BlogRush will have lost a small fortune when it is all said and done, and that this was by choice.

A distribution network with that much reach and no revenue model is worth something to whoever buys it, and what they usually do with it is turn the install base into an ad network without telling anyone. Reese appears to have understood exactly that and shut the thing off instead.

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