Well, it’s been a quite a while since my last post on the ‘news’ front…. So here goes.

BlogRush is over.

In a letter to members, John Reese writes:

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.”

It became apparent to anyone using their Analytics software just how useless BlogRush was for the most part. It just didn’t convert. I recently gave it another try and noted that there were only 2 visitors, and one of them was probably someone verifying the account. In the time I had the widget I don’t think I attracted more than a handful of visitors. Pretty quickly the widget just disappeared from most blogs.

My biggest concern though with the system was the sheer disconnect between Blogrush’s statistics and Analytics results. I have used other advertising systems like this before, but I didn’t expect it to fare so badly. One link from a blog would have generated as much traffic for me, and taken up a lot less space on my blog. In fairness, the hype just created too high a set of expectations… perhaps a lower key approach would have enabled them to stay the course.

EntreCard: on the way out?

I think Entrecard is also in the last stages of its development, I feel … I had two of my blogs removed from EntreCard recently, which prompted MY review of the system. In fact, I have had more visitors as a result of EntreCard, but BlogRush visitors stayed longer, viewed more pages and were more loyal readers than EntreCard. I think the notion of dropping cards is a great idea, but the implementation rewards those who drop rather than those who read.

Worse, the system keeps changing and there are problems with the credits (the value of which keeps changing, the constant flipflopping on sales, and credit taxes on transfers/drops/ad sales). It seems that the changes are designed more to keep the system stable than to present any cogent benefits to bloggers. If you are looking for decent traffic to your site, traffic that stays longer, try simply just commenting on someone’s blog.

I’ve removed it from this blog… and I’ll be removing it from elsewhere slowly. It’s not worth the space.

Tribulant WordPress Banner Rotator plugin

This is a good piece of software and a good alternative to OIO. Increasingly, though, there is more competition in the field, but I used the previous release and found it effective for displaying banners.

A new, innovative release of the WordPress Banner Rotator plugin is currently being developed. It has an improved framework integrated and will fit well into the new WordPress design.

Please subscribe to our blog, either via RSS or via newsletter by subscribing to the “Banner Rotator Plugin” mailing list on here. The new version should be ready for release on the 14th of this month (September).

There are some other useful advertising plugins, I’ll be doing a review of three = stay tuned!