MyBlogLog's Growth

I wrote in my Social Networking Interconnects post the other day:

I do know one thing. MyBlogLog seems to be taking off. The number of contact requests I am getting via MyBlogLog is going up every day.

Well maybe Eric read that. Or maybe not. But he wrote a post on the MyBlogLog blog yesterday outlining exactly how fast MyBlogLog is taking off. Here's my favorite chart. This shows the number of reader rolls served every day.

I like this chart for a couple reasons. First because it shows how fast MyBlogLog is growing. But it also shows how widgets can be used to build a real web presence quickly.

If the widget was an ad, it would be getting a million impressions a day. At the rate that costs on my blog (about $10 cpm) that would cost $300,000 per month. So that's a very valuable attention gathering strategy.

In the case of MyBlogLog, I don't know how the service could work without the reader roll widget. It's the front door and the reason the service is popular. So going from basically zero impressions in at the start of the fourth quarter to over 1 million this week is a great accomplishment. Congrats guys.

Comments

[Andy]

I'd love to know the breakdown of where those increases are coming from.

The question is, have they simply been placed on 5x as many blogs...or more appealing, have the blogs that they've been put on seen a big growth in traffic as a result of having mybloglog on their site?

I'm sure it's a combination, but I'd love to know more :)

[AlFromChicago]

These guys have cracked the code on how to deliver Return On Community -- people join and participate in communities to be seen and to be recognized (I will make my 2000 whitepaper available on my blog later today) -- what MyBlogLog did was allow people to be seen and recognized faster than anybody in the business as well as make it super easy (lower the "cost") to participate -- you don't have to comment, or think of something clever to say, you just have to register!

Genius. I also think we're moving to a world where without these kind of value added services publishers will be very reluctant to cede valuable valuable real estate. So I think these type of services will be the new cost of entry for any kind of ad network.

Congratulations Eric!

[AlFromChicago]

These guys have cracked the code on how to deliver Return On Community -- people join and participate in communities to be seen and to be recognized (I will make my 2000 whitepaper available on my blog later today) -- what MyBlogLog did was allow people to be seen and recognized faster than anybody in the business as well as make it super easy (lower the "cost") to participate -- you don't have to comment, or think of something clever to say, you just have to register!

Genius. I also think we're moving to a world where without these kind of value added services publishers will be very reluctant to cede valuable valuable real estate. So I think these type of services will be the new cost of entry for any kind of ad network.

Congratulations Eric!

[Rick]

Didn't they get purchased by Yahoo, recently? Or was that just a rumor?

[steve]

fred, your data and math confuse me.

previously you have disclosed that AVC makes about $30K/year ad revenues.

in this post you say ad impressions on AVC yield about $10 CPM.

how do those figures correlate?

$30,000/year divided by $10 CPM, says you have sold 3,000 M, or 3,000 x 1,000 impressions, or 3,000,000 impressions.

ignoring the fact that AVC serves multiple ad impression per page view, AVC can not be only doing 3,000,000 page views/year...?

[Will]

Another great example of having the right idea at the right time and great viral marketing making all the difference in the world!

Way to go!

[fred]

Steve

I get about 2mm page views per year.

At at $10cpm, that's about $20k per year

My site is not sold out so its about $15k per year.

My feed produced the other $15k of revenue (FeedBurner).

Hope that helps

Fred

[Nate Westheimer]

Rick, I think that Yahoo rumor turned out to be more than a rumor and less than a sale. In his Columbia Business School Alumni Club address Fred seemed to indicate that he missed out on being able to invest in it, and indicated that it was due to a sale to Yahoo, but even he may have been rumored out.

As for MyBlogLog, they certainly have something there -- their "connecting of silos" is highly important, but I think easily replicated if Facebook, for instace, came out with a similar widget and integrated it with their Feed and Mini-Feed features.

If they don't act fast, though, MyBlogLog could take the cake on this one.

[Todd Allen]

I like MyBlogLog, but I have some concerns about the site which are actually compounded by these numbers.

I use the system very infrequently, and have a very low traffic weblog. I still get multiple requests a week to join peoples communities/people joining my communities. That's great and all, but the people clearly aren't readers of my site.

Are people gaming the system?

[cw]

the widget was a great way to get people looking.

but at the end of the day, just having a centralized place that's more visual to keep up with all the blogs i read daily is what got me [and pretty much ALL of hawaii] sticking with it...

christa

[Thomas R. Clifford]

Ever since joining MyBlogLog, I've noticed a sharp increase in traffic flow.

Besides, I've picked up a few new blogs to visit I might have missed otherwise.

Thomas R. Clifford
Filmmaker

[Andy Beard]

Lots of sites don't display the widget for various reasons.

For example I launched a disclosure policy wordpress plugin a few days ago. That site is in my MyBlogLog profile, is a paid pro account for tracking, but I don't have the widget being displayed.

I probably will add it at a later date, but for now I want to avoid traffic leaks and concentrate on the traffic flow through the site.

On my primary site, I have as many people arriving to my site as leaving through Mybloglog, and lots of new quality subscribers that are repeat visitors.

@Todd

Are people gaming the system?

It depends on what you call gaming the system. There are people who add you as a contact hoping you pop by their site, reciprocate the contact and reciprocate joining a site. They also leave a welcome message for every new person they see.

It is using the system to maximise the size of their contact list and community. I am not sure that counts as gaming it.

[Tom W.]

Fred - I use this on four sites now, my own blog and my three onPhilanthropy.com sites. It's great, really builds what I call "user identification" - it de-lurks a certain percentage of users, which helps them to more strongly identify with the media brands, in my view.

I'd love to see MyBlogLog go deeper in the social networking space - I want a social network to develop around onPhilanthropy, but I don't want to send people wandering all over the globe. Nor do I want to add a massive software layer. I want it open, easy, opt-in, customizable by user, hands-off by us, and all leading to one thing - extending the conversation.

To me, that's the homerun for MyBlogLog if they can pull it off. The badges are everything - the stats are nice but secondary. This may be an example of a company starting out to do one thing, seeing another portion of their business skyrocket, and follwing the vapor trail to success.

[Todd Allen]

Andy: Spammers do what they do in hopes that you will pop by their site. That's what I mean by gaming.

Today I received an excellent example of what I mean:

http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/cutrope/

Now, it's possible that beautiful women who run free dating sites spend a lot of time reading my posts on technology. Or....

Again, I really do like MyBlogLog and the widget, but they need to find a way to stop this.

-Todd

[Eric Marcoullier]

Todd -- that's a really complex question that we've been weighing for a while. Some people (myself included) really find random joins and messages annoying, while others are fine with it. Plus, these are often our most engaged members -- so we really want to cut them off at the knees? I just posted about this and asked for feedback from MyBlogLog members -- I hope you'll take a moment to weigh in with your thoughts in the comments.

[Rob Tsai]

I've analyzed the traffic on my blog (one very far out on the long tail), but found that MyBlogLog accounts for about 6 percent of my unique visitors.

I'm curious what others are experiencing.

Here's the rest of my post:

http://zenrob.com/2007/01/01/how-communities-and-widgets-drive-traffic/