The flaws in link and content exchange widgets such as BlogRush have been repeatedly plagued with flaws that either render them utterly useless, or provide biased services in favor of the elite. Here I have identified many of the factors that taint these services despite envisioned theoretical success.

They Link To Irrelevant Content

Your content is frequently mixed with other content that is totally irrelevant. Simply by using a keyword such as “fat” to describe something in your article brings an onslaught of unrelated posts in your widget. Even worse still is the problem of links on your widget that go to non-existent blogs or freshly created blank blogs with only the hello world post displayed in an attempt by users to cheat the referral system.

Cheating Through Loopholes

The theoretical method behind BlogRush is that for every page view your blog has you get an equal number of your articles shown on other sites using the blog. The problem behind is that there’s no incentive for the publishers to get their readers to click on them. By hiding your feed at the dead-bottom of your page you still generate page views, yet don’t expose your visitors to the widget. You then become rewarded with your “cheating” by having an equal number of impressions on other sites who also place their widget on the bottom of the page. And thus the entire purpose of the widget is defeated and it’s a losing battle for everyone involved.

Those That Start Early Win

The initial hype behind BlogRush was in large part based on the fact that if you referred someone to BlogRush, you would get the same amount of impressions as their widget does on their site. This stretches all the way to the people that they refer, and even people who refer under them. It was supposed to go back 10 generations! Let’s look at a little diagram of how much of an exponential number of hits that could have turned out to be. We’ll assume that each blog gets 100 views a day.

*I’m sorry for the horrible picture quality. It looked great at first but it didn’t fit so I had to shrink it. Then MS-Paint didn’t want to cooperate with me because I ditched it for Photoshop many months ago. You can find the full-size version here.

If you were to assume that each referral blog got 100 pageviews a day you would get 2,100 credits of pageviews just from referrals up to the third generation! And this isn’t even anywhere close to the maximum. Notice how I only went up to the third generation because of running out of space? Well if you actually went up to the 10th generation you could receive 51,200 page views! I think you see what I’m trying to get at here, how the potential behind this method is insane. The problem is, the early adopters won. What do I mean by won? Well, the early adopters were Generation 1 or Generation 2 and as such they’re pageview credits soared. However smaller blogs were boxed out in that most readers had already seen it on more popular blogs and thus already been referred by the big boys. Slowly the hype started to die and the rate of people registering grew smaller and smaller. What was ironic was that many high profile blogs at the time were not using the widget and yet still praised it beyond belief in their reviews in order to get referrals.

The Elite Rule The Blogosphere

Another interesting aspect of BlogRush was that it let you use your pageview credits on sites other than your own. Let me make that a bit clearer for you in case that didn’t stand out enough. An A-Blogger with 50,000 views daily makes a new blog about gardening. He uses all the credits he gets from his pageviews on his A-list Blog and spends them on his Gardening one to jump-start his blog with unheard of growth that would otherwise cost thousands of dollars. How can new bloggers compete with blogs that can generate more traffic in one day than they could in an entire year?

Conclusion

BlogRush had the potential to be something great. With its fresh ideas and emphasis on promoting other peoples content rather than just bland links with no meaning it was viewed in the blogging community as something revolutionary. However, the system was taken advantage of by bloggers and the poor management by BlogRush didn’t help either. BlogRush was down for the first month of its release due to bugs, a sign that it was obviously rushed out to market. Maybe on day, link and content exchange services might prove to be beneficial to both small and large publishers alike, but until then they are flawed to favor the elite.