BlogBurst Wants to Give Us Money January 15, 2007

Posted by Todd Zeigler in Bivings, Blogs, Media, Newspaper Study

BlogBurst is a service that makes content from a pre-screened group of blogs available to a network of publishers, including the likes of USA Today and Reuters. We signed The Bivings Report up with BlogBurst right when it launched in May in an effort to get more folks to read our content. Since then we’ve had a few stories picked up by Reuters, which has generated a lot of headline views (around 850,000) and a modest number of post views (around 1,500).

From our perspective, there is no real downside to BlogBurst. That is 1,500 post views we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. The more people that read our stuff the better.

Then today I got an email from BlogBurst saying that during the fourth quarter of 2006 we were their 45th most popular blog based on headline views. They also offered us $100 as a reward, with the option to donate the money to charity (Periwinkle Foundation) or keep the cash for ourselves. After reading up on the Periwinkle Foundation, we chose to donate the money.

Obviously, $100 is nothing for a full quarter of blogging. But seeing as we signed up for BlogBurst for exposure and not money, it is a nice bonus.

Here is a list of our posts that have been picked up by Reuters so far, from most to least in terms of headline views.

Trackbacks/Pings

  1. Vote -1 Vote +1Micro Persuasion - January 18th, 2007 at 6:08 am

Comments

  1. Vote -1 Vote +1Robin Hamman - January 16th, 2007 at 6:37 am

    I was initially enthusiastic about blogburst myself but was set straight by a commenter who posted a link to this:

    http://www.medgadget.com/archi.....urs_1.html

    Apparently, blogburst’s terms and conditions amount to a rights grab - here’s an excerpt from the blogburst terms and conditions, as quoted in the post I’ve linked to above:

    … you grant to Pluck and its affiliates a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license to reproduce, distribute, make derivative works of, perform, display, disclose, and otherwise dispose of the Work (and derivative works thereof) for the purposes of (a) modifying the Work without substantially changing its original meaning, and (b) distributing the Work (and derivative works thereof) to Publisher electronic web sites or corresponding printed editions, whether now known or hereafter devised.

  2. Vote -1 Vote +1Todd Zeigler - January 16th, 2007 at 3:58 pm

    Robin,

    Great point. I noticed how onerous their contract is when I signed up. I will take a closer look at it. For us though, the benefit of exposing more people to our content outweighs the copyright concerns. Others will legitimately reach the conclusion to stay far away from BlogBurst given the issues you describe.

  3. Vote -1 Vote +1Eric Newman - January 19th, 2007 at 11:05 am

    I encourage you to look at the BlogBurst contributor agreement in its current state. We changed it considerably in Q3 to remove a number of the onerous requirements after hearing feedback from a number of bloggers. You can read more about it here

    If you still feel there are issues, please let us know. We are constantly re-evaluating the offering/agreements/etc to make this a successful service for our blogger and publisher partners
    -Eric Newman, Pluck (BlogBurst)

About this blog

The Bivings Report (TBR) is a source of news, insight, research and analysis on the web-based communications industry. TBR content is posted, created and managed by internet strategists, media/communications analysts, web developers, designers and programmers, all of whom are employees of The Bivings Group.



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