Having the Blogrush widget displayed on your blog can mean two things:

1. You are getting thousands of additional visitors a week.
2. You are loosing visitors, because they find the headlines as advertised on Blogrush more compelling than yours.

Looks like nothing to gain, you get more visitors, but you also might loose visitors. Well, that's not exactly what happens. You could be afraid of loosing visitors with any form of monetization. Be it AdSense (that I just wrote about in the last post), banner ads, affiliate links and banners, …, etc.

“Keep your headlines ‘hot’ and your content valuable!”

That's the best and only medicine that should be prescribed to keep and extend your readership.

Every once in a while I click on a title (in the Blogrush widget) myself that seems to be kind of interesting, but most often I get disappointed.

“A title alone is not enough of an indicator to signal, if a post or a blog is worthwhile visiting. In the majority of cases it is not.”

The review based listings of Digg, Stumble, Propeller, and Co. are much more useful.

That's why I don't blame my readers for not clicking themselves away from my Blog via Blogrush.

To answer the above question: Blogrush does not lead my readers away. So it does not hurt me, as well as I don't really benefit from it. I actually should start looking for a better use of that screen real-estate.

Some major A-Blogs still show Blogrush, probably because they got a huge referral network that works better for them.

It was a hype, it's days are counted and if you look at John Reese's Blog. Not much going on there. Didn't he promise a promotion network for “hot topics”? I think he did.

The classic theorem of physics seems to withstand the test of time in the Internet Age, too.

“No output, without any input!”

Displaying someone's widget — the Blogrush widget — doesn't solve your traffic problems. There must be more action going on.

Yours
John W. Furst