“BlogRush Is Shutting Down” is the statement now greeting you when you visit the BlogRush web site. In truth, it has shut down already, so time to remove those widgets if you still have them on your site.
As you may remember, the idea of BlogRush was that you’d stick a widget on your blog linking to other blogs for which you got credits. With those credits, you earned a place on BlogRush widgets on other blogs. Nice idea, but it hit all kinds 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.
I think (though I may be wrong) that the gaming of the system was the real killer. Most people who used the widget (I tried it out on a number of blogs) lost faith when things started going pear-shaped. Additionally, there was no real incentive for people to click the links, unless by a slim chance it may have been related to what they were reading at the time.
I’ve written a number of posts on BlogRush in the past (see here, here and here). It’s a shame to see them go belly up, but I’ve a feeling it was kinda doomed from the start.
