If you have a blog, the first thing that you need to improve is readership. Readership is not easy to gain, especially if the owner and writer of a site is a virtual unknown. The option left to the blogger is to advertise.
The three biggest advertising networks in the last 4 years that played the most significant part in promoting member's blogs and directing both wanted and unwanted visitors are all gone. Without appearing too hypocritical, two of those networks were instrumental in improving my blogs' rankings, although artificial most of the time.
CMF Ads folded up in late October 2011 citing declining activity by their members. Two months later, Adgitize followed suit and announced last December 2011 that they have to close shop because "the costs to run the business were more than the revenues generated." Last September 2012 and without any warning whatsoever, Entrecard just decided to stop their operations. Many were left wondering what happened and this gave rise to several speculations, which I will not 'sugar-coat' anymore.
While each of these networks offers its own distinct benefit to bloggers, their closure should not leave deep emotional scars. These networks may have been able to provide traffic to blogs that would have been normally ignored in blogosphere, but they come with a price. All three provide a method to potentially manipulate and falsely inflate blog statistics, most especially Alexa Rank.
And because Alexa Rank is a frequently used measurement of the blog's popularity by so many, the three networks act like a life-support system to many sites, that would otherwise fail to exist if the plug was pulled.
With the recent increase of new bloggers in the blogosphere, the bar has been set higher to provide content that is intelligent, relevant, engaging, and more importantly entertaining. Sites that are poorly-constructed would have easily folded when exposed to these strenuous exercises, unless CMF Ads, Adgitize and Entrecard can provide them a lifeline – other bloggers.
The three defunct networks provided incentives in the form of earnings, virtual points, advertising opportunities and reciprocal visits to bloggers if they visit member sites, regardless of whether they want to or not. Some sites even provided instructions and conditions to their readers to minimize 'bounce' rates by explaining how long they need to stay on the site and what ads they have to click.
As a result, the three networks help present a very skewed view of the site’s popularity, convinced some bloggers that the blog world is confined solely within their network's 'micro-community' and other elements of blogging (i.e. article marketing, search engine optimization and content analysis) are badly ignored.
Look, I use them too and I am as guilty as anybody here. But, maybe the closure of CMF Ads, Adgitize and Entrecard presents an opportunity for us to refocus our goal. Maybe it is time to think seriously on how to attract readers to the site's content, how to interact actively with the blogs’ community and how to improve the network of bloggers and readers. To be the most 'dropped' site or to be considered as the 'best dropper' would be ... an abomination?
The three biggest advertising networks in the last 4 years that played the most significant part in promoting member's blogs and directing both wanted and unwanted visitors are all gone. Without appearing too hypocritical, two of those networks were instrumental in improving my blogs' rankings, although artificial most of the time.
CMF Ads folded up in late October 2011 citing declining activity by their members. Two months later, Adgitize followed suit and announced last December 2011 that they have to close shop because "the costs to run the business were more than the revenues generated." Last September 2012 and without any warning whatsoever, Entrecard just decided to stop their operations. Many were left wondering what happened and this gave rise to several speculations, which I will not 'sugar-coat' anymore.
While each of these networks offers its own distinct benefit to bloggers, their closure should not leave deep emotional scars. These networks may have been able to provide traffic to blogs that would have been normally ignored in blogosphere, but they come with a price. All three provide a method to potentially manipulate and falsely inflate blog statistics, most especially Alexa Rank.
And because Alexa Rank is a frequently used measurement of the blog's popularity by so many, the three networks act like a life-support system to many sites, that would otherwise fail to exist if the plug was pulled.
With the recent increase of new bloggers in the blogosphere, the bar has been set higher to provide content that is intelligent, relevant, engaging, and more importantly entertaining. Sites that are poorly-constructed would have easily folded when exposed to these strenuous exercises, unless CMF Ads, Adgitize and Entrecard can provide them a lifeline – other bloggers.
The three defunct networks provided incentives in the form of earnings, virtual points, advertising opportunities and reciprocal visits to bloggers if they visit member sites, regardless of whether they want to or not. Some sites even provided instructions and conditions to their readers to minimize 'bounce' rates by explaining how long they need to stay on the site and what ads they have to click.
As a result, the three networks help present a very skewed view of the site’s popularity, convinced some bloggers that the blog world is confined solely within their network's 'micro-community' and other elements of blogging (i.e. article marketing, search engine optimization and content analysis) are badly ignored.
Look, I use them too and I am as guilty as anybody here. But, maybe the closure of CMF Ads, Adgitize and Entrecard presents an opportunity for us to refocus our goal. Maybe it is time to think seriously on how to attract readers to the site's content, how to interact actively with the blogs’ community and how to improve the network of bloggers and readers. To be the most 'dropped' site or to be considered as the 'best dropper' would be ... an abomination?
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That's why the widget was malfunctioned. It's closed. *Sigh! I missed blog hopping and leave comments.