It’s hard not to have respect for John after all he’s done in the industry.

As is often the case, some people will make the product or service out to be much more than it really is. I think that’s what motivated this post. There are far worse programs out there than Blog Rush and while the idea behind it has some value, the implementation could use a little work.

On the other hand, though, I do appreciate John Reese getting on here and commenting and trying to clear things up. His argument isn’t good enough to convince me to register, but I do have a lot of respect for the guy.

I gave it a break after their “initial launching problem” phase (you can call it public beta testing for nothing), but the widget is a pain in the ass. Even after they have done their quality assessment and booted a gazillion of blogs there are still “Hello World” blog entries on the system and totally non-content blogging stuff that is highly annoying to have in a widget that touts to bring target traffic to your blog.

There are better ways to bring traffic to your blog, and if it is with stealth strategies like http://www.buryadsense.com

Semmy Stumpp
http://www.semmy.name
Without Fun There Is No Success!

My review was based on information available on the Blogrush site at the time of writing.

If you read the comments above, you’ll see I’ve corrected myself after being pointed to the facts concerned.

Your maths is completely flawed. They don’t pay out 1 credit for an impression by a 10th level referral, it’s 1/8th of a credit. The whole thing scales meaning for every impression (5 links), 4.5 credits are given out, learving 10% of impressions for BlogRush to keep themselves running.

Bruce: I haven’t thought that much on how to improve it but if I had to take one direction it would be this: allow publishers more control on what content shows up in their widget. Arrange for a more equitable distribution of traffic.

Allow for publishers to be rewarded on CTR also, thus penalizing those that “cheat legally” by placing the widget where nobody sees it.

Samuel: Thanks for the link. I agree that is another problem. The widget only tracks impressions and that creates a gap between those that have it above the fold and those that hide it in the nether regions of the blog, this to the disadvantage of more comitted bloggers.

I like your review, very honest & insightful, I just linked to you.

Even if you wanna use BlogRush, put the widget at the bottom of your sidebar. Why give away traffic for free? (Even if the links open in a new browser.

I rather have ads on my sidebar.

Once the BH’s are mostly eliminated and all the haters tire of talking Blogrush down, It may work fairly well. There’s a tremendous interest in this concept and need for it.

I would be interested to hear how you would do this. Care to share? or is it a total waste trying to make it better than it currently is? What would you do to make it fairer or more ‘realistic’?

Bruce

a) Nice to see that at least HE believes in what he’s doing – and is trying his best to make it a “fair system”.

b) What a compliment to NFM that it was “worthy” of so rapid a response, by such a well-known Internet figure!

2) I still wouldn’t touch Blog Rush, with a 10-foot DSL cable.

Too complicated. Too untested. Too “leaky”. Too open to BH abuse.

Just too questionable…