Get 20,000+ FREE LINKS. Rank #1 in Google
 

BlogRush Is Shutting Down

written by John Chow on October 30th, 2008

BlogRush, the traffic building widget started by Internet marketing kinpin, John Reese, has decided to close it doors forever. Launched in late 2007, BlogRush spread like a wildfire all over the Web as thousands of bloggers (me included) installed the widget. However, fast growth brought its share of problems.

BlogRush didn’t grow without its fair share of problems — from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected. We also had some problems with trying to fairly control the quality of the network, and in the process made many mistakes in deciding what blogs should stay or go. All of these issues, ultimately, limited the service’s full potential.

I wrote a post on what went wrong with BlogRush back in September. I guess they were unable to overcome the problems. If you’re still running the BlogRush widget, it’s time to remove it.

AffiliateObsession said on October 30th, 2008 at 9:55 am

Oh man! I was just trying to get my newest blog accepted too. Nice heads up!

Reply to this comment
Derek Salyers said on October 30th, 2008 at 11:27 am

It’s just good to see a company that is willing admit defeat and close the service down instead of dragging it out forever. *cough* Entrecard *cough* These people are willing to let their service drag on forever to satisfy those few that think it’s actually good so that they can rake in some dough the whole time.

It’s good to see someone decide not to take the money and just to do what was needed morally.

Reply to this comment
Tushar Dhoot said on October 30th, 2008 at 11:50 am

I agree. Not the entrecard thing, but how it was smart for them to shut it down. I can’t believe they didn’t sell it though. They could have raked in some decent cash for the script alone.

Reply to this comment
Kok Choon said on October 30th, 2008 at 11:54 am

Agreed, it may take some time to sell the whole business, but if there is a monitize strategy, I think John already done it himself…

Reply to this comment
Abdul said on November 4th, 2008 at 3:18 am

Haha, good thing I started using it about 3 months ago and took off the widget 9 days later. I gathered more than 5000 credits but unfortunately only 1/5th of them were used in 3 months.

Reply to this comment
TYCP Entertainment Magazine said on October 30th, 2008 at 9:18 pm

I agree with you. I give the owner props for being a man & admitting that BlogRush just didn’t work out as well as expected.

Reply to this comment
Daniel Kemp said on October 30th, 2008 at 11:49 am

That is what I was doing too.

John Reese is still a cool dude.

Reply to this comment
Ryan McLean said on October 30th, 2008 at 12:28 pm

Yea he is and he always will be. At least they were honest about not being able to keep up with it. Its always nice to see a honest company. And they did a good job while they stayed in business.

Reply to this comment
ZK@WebTrafficROI said on October 30th, 2008 at 12:46 pm

I love the honesty here..it seemed like a pet project

Reply to this comment
John Chow said on October 30th, 2008 at 3:44 pm

I’m pretty sure it was a pet project for him.

Reply to this comment
Learn to earn on the Net said on November 4th, 2008 at 3:26 am

I wonder if he made anything in between!

Reply to this comment
Learn to earn on the Net said on November 4th, 2008 at 3:32 am

I meant money….lol

Reply to this comment
AverageGal said on October 30th, 2008 at 1:08 pm

It’s a double edged sword… Everyone wants to be successful, but you have to be careful not to grow too fast, too soon. Too bad, but definitely a good thing that they’re aware of what they can and cannot handle. Respectable!

Reply to this comment
Make money online said on October 30th, 2008 at 10:41 pm

It already lose its charm…

It became popular like a fire and went down with the same pace. :(

Reply to this comment
Money Money Money said on October 31st, 2008 at 10:57 am

Entrecard will shut down too, don’t worry :)

EC is one of the worst services, trust me worst then Blogrush.

Reply to this comment
Mike said on October 30th, 2008 at 10:02 am

I wonder how far Entrecard is behind BlogRush?

Reply to this comment
Affiliate Confession said on November 2nd, 2008 at 8:53 pm

Can’t be that far behind. Entrecard is full of nothing but pretty much spam blogs now.

Reply to this comment
Bruno Auger said on October 30th, 2008 at 10:13 am

I never even used BlogRush. I never really thought the service was that great to begin with. I wasn’t suprised that eventually it was going to shut down.

Reply to this comment
Arfan said on October 30th, 2008 at 10:15 am

I just took off the blugrush widget right now

Reply to this comment
Ben Pei said on October 31st, 2008 at 11:03 pm

I am sure you have lotsa free space now

Reply to this comment
jackie sheeler said on October 30th, 2008 at 10:22 am

one more of many, and surely many more to come, shutdown stories. i work for a dotcom, and i am paying attention and trying not to worry!

Reply to this comment
Anonymous said on October 30th, 2008 at 10:27 am

I for one am not surprised.

In today’s marketplace, you do not have the luxury of turning away business.

My BlogRush account was simply DELETED after I got 50 blogs under me signed up for it. I had an Alexa in the 300,000 range and some of the blogs that I recommended that signed up had Alexa’s in the 50,000 and one had 50,000 visitors/month.

And the way they thank me is to delete my account and give me a multiple choice form letter, it was either this, this or this. Adding insult to injury was the lame replies from their “team” of “you can reapply in 60 days. No thank you. Is John Reese really that ignorant and ungrateful? Apparently so. No one cares how great your tools are if you are a pomopous ass.

You cannot treat people this way in this economy and expect to have any kind of success.

What goes around comes around I guess.

Reply to this comment
Kok Choon said on October 30th, 2008 at 11:47 am

It seems like John Reese did piss off many people with some quality filter…!

However, he did his best to provide the **FREE** services, we should cut him some slack…

Reply to this comment
atlanta wedding photographer said on October 30th, 2008 at 4:16 pm

kok did you use the widget?

Reply to this comment
ZK@WebTrafficROI said on October 30th, 2008 at 10:42 am

I wonder how entrecard will do in the next 6 - 8 months

Reply to this comment
eGruve.com said on October 30th, 2008 at 10:43 am

Thanks for the heads up

Reply to this comment
Sara said on October 30th, 2008 at 10:48 am

It is soooo horrible how people mess it up for everybody. I bet you that Google probably had something to do with it as well.

Reply to this comment
blackysky said on October 30th, 2008 at 11:13 am

ahah maybe not google .. the system was wrong from day 1 … like any other traffic exchange widget in the past..

Reply to this comment
Caleb said on October 30th, 2008 at 11:34 am

Google along with all the major complaints users were having…it was only a matter of time for this. Instead of all these widgets it’s best to just go back to basics with a bit of unorthodox methodolgy ;)

Reply to this comment
Kok Choon said on October 30th, 2008 at 11:50 am

I think people is the problem. Here’s why:

Everyone want to get traffic from other blogs, but many don’t like to share…

Some even manufacture clicks through for more credits…! If John can’t detect fraud accurately, it will make the situation worst.

As mention in his blog, BlogRush failed to increase the click through…I think he failed because of people!

Reply to this comment
More Blogrush Videos said on October 30th, 2008 at 11:11 am

Many thanks to abusive users that caused a good service closed

Reply to this comment
Patrick said on October 30th, 2008 at 11:25 am

That’s too bad. Best of luck though to John, it was a good try.

Reply to this comment
Tushar Dhoot said on October 30th, 2008 at 11:48 am

Wow, this sucks. I installed the widget for the first time yesterday and today it shut down.

Reply to this comment
Kok Choon said on October 30th, 2008 at 11:51 am

Congratulation! haha…just the wrong timing!

Reply to this comment
Keral Patel said on October 30th, 2008 at 12:09 pm

What a co incidence. I added their widget and even removed it in 7 days. It was of no use though.

Reply to this comment
JP @ Tickerwatcher said on October 31st, 2008 at 10:05 pm

It didn’t do much for me either - oh well on to the next big thing

Reply to this comment
Josten said on October 30th, 2008 at 2:23 pm

and i was trying to get signed up for them also.
O well

Reply to this comment
Greg Ellison said on October 30th, 2008 at 4:00 pm

I didn’t really like the service, but i am guilty of installing the widget. Greg Ellison

Reply to this comment
Demetrius said on October 30th, 2008 at 4:34 pm

Yea BlogRush is a tool I used but early on I saw that it was failing and removed it. It had potential too!

Reply to this comment
dev said on October 30th, 2008 at 5:16 pm

that too bad that BlogRush Is Shutting Down

Reply to this comment
Trevor said on October 30th, 2008 at 5:22 pm

It’s unfortunate that BlogRush is shutting down but I never liked BlogRush on one of my test websites anyway.

Saves time for people like me =)

Reply to this comment
Not John Chow said on October 30th, 2008 at 6:30 pm

It was fun while it lasted.

Reply to this comment
One Stop Game News said on October 30th, 2008 at 7:38 pm

I used them and never got any traffic from them. So I am not surprised. It’s nice that they are so honest.

Reply to this comment
TYCP Entertainment Magazine said on October 30th, 2008 at 9:19 pm

I’m not surprised in the least. Perhaps John has a better project in the works.

Reply to this comment
BusinessX said on October 30th, 2008 at 9:36 pm

Only coming on blogrush now, but their demise does give me pause when evaluating other services. We bloggers often want to be the first adopters, but when failure comes how do we look? Plus, the sheer amount of programs and services available, there is only so much room, time, and money. Myself, may start looking at some qualifiers like how many years in business and good reviews before trying a new service.

Then again, I haven’t been burned yet. Newest services I am using are Picapp, TNX, and Voxant on different sites. So far so good.

Reply to this comment
VeRonda said on October 30th, 2008 at 9:48 pm

It sucks when something like this happens… Especially when it was a benefit to so many.

Reply to this comment
Alberto said on October 30th, 2008 at 10:27 pm

The traffic it brought for me was pitiful and I really wanted something off my sidebar. Now I had the perfect thing to muck. Oh, and loading times have improved as a result. Whoopie!

Reply to this comment
Mike Huang said on October 31st, 2008 at 12:59 am

I could’ve sworn it was already dead. Didn’t the development stop about half a year ago? They didn’t really do much to fix any of their problems.

-Mike

Reply to this comment
Hunny said on October 31st, 2008 at 7:36 am

Yes… Its dead…. But still I want to know the ways how BlogRush managed to grow so so soooo fast.

Reply to this comment
Haroon said on October 31st, 2008 at 8:13 am

It started with a boom with traffic shooting up like anything in the first few days and then gradually dead. It was an instant fame for John. He is smart in pulling wildfire traffic. I’m sure he’ll come up with more such ideas; although of not much worth to anybody else.

Reply to this comment
Daniel said on October 31st, 2008 at 9:37 am

I hate to say it but, Good Ridden’s!

Reply to this comment
Unique Gift Ideas said on October 31st, 2008 at 9:39 am

Never liked this service anyway, no care…

Reply to this comment
bill said on October 31st, 2008 at 1:29 pm

Good riddance. ‘Course, I’m a little bitter because they turned my site down :)

“Not enough original content”.

What was interesting to me is that I checked out the logs, and they only looked at one page of the site, and it wasn’t the front page. I’m not clear on how they decided it didn’t have enough content :)

Reply to this comment
Dot_Commie said on October 31st, 2008 at 2:46 pm

lol @ all the bloggers who believed in John Reese.

Reply to this comment
TYCP Entertainment Magazine said on November 1st, 2008 at 2:57 am

That’s your idea of making a contribution to a post?

Reply to this comment
Ben Pei said on October 31st, 2008 at 11:02 pm

Yeah just removed it.. Sad to see it go!

Reply to this comment
Jason Sieckmann said on November 1st, 2008 at 12:07 am

That sucks, I didn’t even get to try it.

Reply to this comment
youfoundjake said on November 1st, 2008 at 7:50 pm

John, since I’m going to be removing the widget, care to advertise on the site? That spot will only run you 100 million dollars.
Thanks for the heads up!!!

Reply to this comment
Sam With Traffic Is King said on November 2nd, 2008 at 12:55 am

I can’t fault John Reese. He put up $500k of his own money if not more to start BlogRush. That’s what entrepreneurs do. They put there money where there mouth is and take risks.

Reply to this comment
Zubair said on November 2nd, 2008 at 1:17 pm

what a shame :( i didn’t even get to try it either :(

Reply to this comment
Affiliate Confession said on November 2nd, 2008 at 8:54 pm

No big surprise about Blog Rush. I ran it for several months on a couple of blogs I have and got almost no traffic in return.

Reply to this comment
Fiona Broome said on November 5th, 2008 at 2:21 pm

This isn’t a huge surprise, but it’s also sad that a great, cooperative concept wasn’t able to succeed, long term.

I never used BlogRush, being a little skeptical and cynical from the start, and concerned about quality control issues. (My sidebar is overloaded already. I’m very careful about what I add.)

That said, I admire John Reese’s vision and idealism, and the decision to do what’s right instead of what’s merely a means towards profits.

Perhaps BlogRush can be reinvented with safeguards that will make it more viable. I hope so. The basic idea was good.

Reply to this comment
MelodyN said on November 5th, 2008 at 2:42 pm

I just received the email a couple of days ago that Blogrush was ending.. I was sooo bummed out because I had just started the program..

Reply to this comment
Nancy Redford said on November 5th, 2008 at 3:00 pm

I used BlogRush on some blogs but I must admit like many widgets I have long forgotten it exists!

John Reese is a true entrepreneur and has many successful ventures so I guess it’s no huge loss for him. Just another adventure in the online business arena!

Damb it was free so what the heck!

Reply to this comment
ProvenCashTacticsSecret said on November 6th, 2008 at 12:54 am

BlogRush widget is big bad burden on many blogs with no accompanying good results. Thanks Heaven for its demise.

Reply to this comment
Dfunda said on November 7th, 2008 at 10:32 am

it is sad new to hear

Reply to this comment
Dfunda said on November 7th, 2008 at 10:32 am

it is sad news to hear

Reply to this comment
Dfunda said on November 7th, 2008 at 10:35 am

i did not try their service at all. most of the people got huge rush of traffic from them for free

Reply to this comment
annoyetrader blog said on November 11th, 2008 at 12:05 pm

dang, any other other sites like this?

Reply to this comment
German Romance said on November 18th, 2008 at 1:18 am

Hopefully there are coming someting similar to the market place soon.

Reply to this comment

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.