BlogRush is a Blog Bust

BlogRush is billing itself as "The fastest and easiest way to instantly drive a flood of targeted readers to you Blog...absolutely FREE". Well, hell ya' it's free. Let me tell you why....First of all the only folks that can really see any substantial traffic from this widget are the folks who already have traffic. You need to supply widget referral (affiliate) sign ups and visits to your Blog to earn exposure for your own post titles to be displayed. So here is the formula BlogRush supplies...

Syndication credits are earned based on the following formula: You earn credits on your own traffic using a 1:1 ratio. (One credit for each time the widget is served.)

You then earn credits based on your referrals traffic (and their referrals traffic)through 10 generations of referrals based on the following ratios: 1st and 2nd generation (i.e. your direct referrals and their direct referrals) 1:1, 3rd - 6th generation = 1:4 ratio, 7th - 10th generation = 1:8 ratio.

After all the math is calculated, there is a surplus of 1 headline space (5 spaces in each widget load) for every 10 that are served. So 10% of all the headline space is reserved for BlogRush itself to sell or use.

Here's the kicker.....1 Syndication Credit = having one of their recent blog post titles served inside the widget on another member's blog. My thing here, is there is no mention of they quality, content match, nor traffic volume of the Blog that they will choose to run my one precious headline on...Nor which headline they will run. Also, you will notice that apparently in the referral flow in the latter generations they seem to serve the same formula but with more Blogs...So even if you are kicking butt with sign ups you still may be displaying you headline on Blogs that will never convert for you. I would also be interested to know, does your headline rotate in a queue, or does it hang in a Blog until someone views the page? They make no mention of this process...So I am curious if my headline is slated to display on a low traffic Blog, if it takes 12 hours to display does it still get served or move to a different Blog...Or maybe they will serve my next more recent headline to the same Blog? These are possibilities...I am of a curious nature. =-)

And then there's this...While they do in fact call themselves a syndication network, did you all get this?

By submitting Content to Income.com for inclusion in our Service, you grant Income.com a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of promoting your blog. If you delete Content, Income.com will use reasonable efforts to remove it from the Service, but you acknowledge that caching or references to the Content may not be made immediately unavailable.

Let me tell what that means to me....BlogRush could conceivably build it's Page Rank up pretty quickly. So, at some point it might decide to provide a feed or site with posts, or large excerpts.............Now if their PR is higher than mine, boom all of my posts which they use go to the supplemental index. I don't know about you, but I prefer to syndicate my own content!

I am also very disturbed that such a huge undertaking would violate one of the biggest webmaster rules (at least in my book) and be released "under construction".....As it remains, still the reports feature is under construction. Not to mention they are already reporting "cheating" in the dashboard section, and attempting to move to a manual selection process. Now, for the first time we actually see that all important word "BETA".....HMMMM. Still, not when you sign up, or even in the header...way down in the bottom of the dashboard.

I signed up to check it out. I am with Tim on this one....The damn thing is UGLY. Not to mention I cannot re-size it to fit in my 3 column layout.....So what good will it do at the bottom with it's already lowly 0.05% click though rate reported by some bloggers? OK, so now they have color...errr I mean "flavors"....But one size fits all!

Want to know how badly you're getting screwed? I signed up, as I said to check it out...I installed the widget.....played around with trying to size it. Moved it to the bottom, watched the damn video....then removed it.......maybe 2 hours. Alas, I have no clicks, but many impressions still accumulating everyday and credits as well. Low and behold............

widget.blogrush.com / referral
2 Visits
1.00 Pages
00:00:00 Time on site
100.00% New
100.00% Bounce

Now, mind you...my intention was not to screw anyone. I would also say this is probably not exactly targeted traffic either....My site averages are:

2.21 Pages
4.11 Time on site
54.8% New
65.16% Bounce

So their traffic clearly doesn't fit my profile. So now I appear to be somewhat trapped in BlogRush hell, as there doesn't appear to be a way to unenroll. I don't want them to be duplicating my content, so I guess I will have to send a email. I cannot even change the Blog address without replacing it with another, and the feed...cannot be changed at all. True pyramid style! What a CROCK!

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

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