So finally - after months and months of slogging, writing, re-writing, and whole lot of annoying, we get to release the latest version of Blog Flux.

There were two main things we were targeting - bringing more cohesiveness to our separate ‘parts’, and to start building a proper community. With over 150,000 registered users, we should have been doing more than we were.

One of the most time-consuming elements of this was the design. There are almost a hundred ‘unique’ pages in terms of design, structure, and appearance. All of these pages still need to keep a cohesive look to keep the user experience simple.

So what is actually new?

Blog Flux Talk - custom built message board system from the ground up.

Blog Flux Articles - name says it all.

Quizzes - always a favorite with bloggers, about time we launched our own

Still more to come (as always), including a hosted version of iBegin Share, but right now I think we are on the right track.

So I got back today - I made a little bit of a blunder and we left the airport … when the flight was leaving in an hour. So we rushed through, cut the lines everywhere, and had time to grab a coffee before we got onto the plane.

I get home and Jacob from Bloggy Network is excited. Turns out Yahoo did some feature on ‘top us jobs’ (on the front page) and linked to search results for that phrase. What came up at #2? None other than one of our sites - Life Spy.

So the site ended up making an extra $1500 (give or take a bit) that it would have otherwise.

What really stunned me was the ‘quality’ of the traffic. The front page feature/search link sent us an extra ~45,000 pageviews. But the CTR on that page was around 15% - giving us a yummy CPM of roughly $35.00! To compare, the normal CTR/CPM are less than 1/4th for each.

So there you have it. One link made us over $1500 in just 12 hours. Looking forward to Yahoo doing it again (and I can only imagine what #1 would have done).

b Feed Me, Celebrific, Blogging Pro, Forever Geek, and Filmsy are no longer owned by Bloggy Network LLC - they are now part of Splashpress. Check out the press release.

I’ve talked about one of our strengths being our diversity - so why sell the blogs?

Quite a few reasons:

1. Blog Flux. It “holy shit this could be huge” excites me. 95,000 [approved] blogs. Alexa in the top 5k. Over 145,000 registered users. Yahoo says 4.4+ million backlinks, Google [sitemaps] says 4.8+ million backlinks. Blog Top Sites has tracked over 1.25 billion pageviews - in under a year!

   This site oozes potential. It has traffic. It has a base. It makes money. What it doesn’t have is a coherent plan to take it to the next level (10+ million backlinks, 500k+ registered users, sub-1000 Alexa). Part of the problem has been time. Our biggest blogs (being the biggest) required considerable effort and time on our end to maintain. Selling them frees us from that. At the same time, the sale provided us with …

2. Liquidity. Cash is the life blood of any business. We are self-funded. Yes Enthropia Inc itself is strongly in the black. Yes we have money that could continue to fund Bloggy Network’s growth. But I already helped fund the creation of BN. Two years in, it’s time for the company to start standing on its own. There is a reason it is its own LLC and not a subsidiary of Enthropia Inc. So the sale provides us with a good liquidity boost as we re-focus on Blog Flux.

3. Resources. Related to liquidity - Gawker and Weblogs Inc got in early, so they got all the press. Since then there have been only two blog networks really worth noting - b5 Media, and Splashpress (who bought the blogs). b5 is VC funded, and Splashpress has its own pool of money. Competing versus that is hard. You have to be realistic. We have our strengths - our fantastic web design department and Blog Flux. Few others can claim such a combo (I can’t think of a single site that competes directly with Blog Flux). So we put our full effort into our unique offerings. Best bang for the buck.

4. Personnel. No doubt about it, the people you have determine how well you do. We had a project recently fall into our lap that was just too good to pass on (it is related to local - and no detail is public yet). So one of our programmers is moving to that. Another blogger (who was the primary writer on b Feed Me, Celebrific, and Filmsy) was promoted. Michael (who wrote primarily on Apple Gazette and Forever Geek was promoted to run our city-blog network: is My Home. And since his passion was Apple, Forever Geek was the odd man out. And they wanted David [to deal with the technical issues - their weak point]. A good fit for David too - he was close to their Performancing team, and the blog he ran was Blogging Pro. All this movement created a huge headache for us - finding good capable bloggers. The simple solution was to move on.

It’s a win-win for both. Splashpress gets some high quality blogs with real loyal followings. We get to stay small and focus on what we think will yield the biggest bang for the buck.

It has taken time for me to truly appreciate how much blogging can affect your work. While I was pretty non-serious about blogging for the past few months, I had quite a few customers/fans of iBegin Source mention how they loved the blog.

It was sort of an eye-opener. I wouldn’t say these people were fans - but I would say they were people who respected and valued my opinion. If you sit down and really think about it - it is a hard task. Yes you can impress, yes you can wow - but when your mere opinion on the possible mundane is valued by someone else - that is quite something.

So - any large site really cannot afford not to blog.

Case example: Anonymous large site. The dominant site in a category. I convinced the owner to add a blog about 4 months ago. They’ve been posting semi-regularly. Not the most amazing stuff - just solid decent stuff. They are getting a few comments. Beyond adding a link in the menu bar, and a little announcement (you can see the bump right around the Sept 28 weekend dip), they have not promoted it at all. No emails to anyone. No linkbait. No submissions to social sites.

Their feedcount:

It isn’t the largest # (482 as of today). But (discounting the bump), you can say they are averaging 100 new subscribers a month. In a year they could have over 1200 receptive and tuned in users interested in what they have to say.

They’ve done the hard work in promoting the overall site. Now they are leveraging that hard work. A more dedicated user base.

I’ve talked about how awesome local blogs are, but Gothamist continues to impress me.

Check out their Quantcast numbers. 80,000 unique visitors a day. 7,000,000 US pageviews a month (yes I went from day to month). Over $3 million in revenue a year. 30% of their traffic are regulars. With highly educated and rich visitors.

Even more stunning - 60% of their traffic is just two areas - New York and Los Angeles. Imagine if they could fully replicate their success in other major metros (I’m looking at you Chicago and Toronto).

All from the ground up. All with nothing but a focus on blogging about their locale.

Why do all the local analysts ignore this fantastic homegrown success?

I had an interesting call earlier this week. When we originally launched iBegin Source, we almost blew the floor off the competition. Our entire approach was efficiency and efficacy - do it right (the first time), do it fast, and do it simple - remove barriers to save costs (especially in terms of man-power).

Imagine my surprise - one of the ‘Big Three’ was willing to offer Full US for 36 months at $2000 a month.

For another post, but the noise volume over at iBegin is definitely on the up-and-up. By making sure we are around, keeping in contact, our “presence” is starting to get felt, and it seems like the competition is responding. We have quite a few customers now who were going to go with the Big Three - but ended up with us. Price? Support? Our vision? This blog (I myself am flattered by how many compliments I’ve gotten here).

Even better is that our presence is now strong enough that we are cash-flow positive. Isn’t that a peachy thought. Which at the same time isn’t to scare our current customers - the rest of Enthropia Inc does well enough to cover any issues (plus savings). But iBegin is almost ready to stand on its own two feet.

I’m terribly excited for 2008. Not that we are interested in selling (consider me as someone who builds lifestyle companies), but we had a buyout offer in the low seven digits. By end of 2008 we should be at least in the eight digits. We have a lot of stuff to do and implement - so much in the pipeline - our small team means fast results with low overhead. First on the agenda is taking direct control over is My Home and giving it a shake (the current manager for that is … leaving … more on that very soon).

The recently concluded TRAFFIC (in New York) conference had their domain auction, with the total proceeds exceeding $11,000,000. The two notable giants were creditcheck.com for 3 million (which I do agree with) and seniors.com for 1.8 million (which I don’t agree with).

There were some other interesting domains that didn’t sell (Scotland.com was priced at 3 million). Regardless, the real biggie was the one in my title - Blogging.com went for $135,000. Blogging.com itself is an actual site, thought Alexa/Compete don’t seem to think much of it.

So - $125,000 (lets give the site a value of $10k) - worth it?

Yesterday was Apple’s WWDC 2007 event, complete with Steve Jobs’ keynote (many people felt disappointed by the announcements, but the hype was just nutty). We ourselves covered it live as it happened.

While it was going on, I went around and surfed other Mac sites. And what I found was highway robbery.

When all was said and done, we pushed roughly 150,000 pageviews during that event. People were refreshing the live page like mad, wanting to know what was going on.

It also made sense not to have any advertisements on that website - if someone is following a liveblogging event, that isn’t normal user behavior. They won’t look around at the site. They have one singular purpose - to get the news as it happens.

So when I visited sites like Engadget, all I could think of was - highway robbery.

Engadget is a big site, so a good example. If we did 150,000 pageviews, it is safe to say they did 1.5 million pageviews. For those looking at it from an advertiser’s perspective, 1500 blocks of 1000 ads.

The liveblogging that Engadget did was on a regular blog post. So people, wanting to know what was going on, kept refreshing that post. That post (of course) was complete with ads. So - if I was an advertiser paying $5 CPM, I basically just got burnt for $7500.

Donna Bogatin covered Greg Stuart’s keynote where he argued that of the $295 billion spent in advertising ever year, over $112 billion is wasted.

Ad networks are supposedly going to be more pro-active and assigning ‘quality scores’ to sites based on their advertising response - sites that throw up ads while doing a liveblogging event need to be hit hard.

So it seems like Google is acquiring FeedBurner for a smooth $100 million.

I like FeedBurner. They provide a useful function. Their support is fantastic. Even had the president email me when we had a few issues. The site exudes charm that is missing from most companies (including quite a few of ours, I will be honest).

So everyone has covered how Google is acquiring a very large audience. Just like Yahoo! locked in Flickr into its ad-network, Google is basically doing the same.

But while that is all obvious and what not, the other benefit is the ton of data that Google is getting (again - similar to what Yahoo did with MyBlogLog, but on a larger scale imo).

Google’s two big pushes in search have been relevance [removing spam] and personalization [give people what they want]. This is why products like Google Analytics and Google Reader haven’t been directly monetized - the entire point is to find out what people find useful and what they like. Google Analytics especially is scary - they know what pages people are visiting, what links they are clicking on, etc. Lets say someone is searching for ‘food’ and two pages come up with near identical relevancy internally. Using Analytics, Google knows Page 1 is on a domain people find more sticky, and that people spend 3x the time on Page 1, while also clicking on 2x the links. So what is better for the user? (both can be argued - Page 1 in terms of longevity of user on the page, Page 2 in terms of user coming back quicker). I’m still surprised Yahoo beat Google to the punch when it came to Del.icio.us.

So the acquisition of FeedBurner gives them a ton more information. They know clickrate. They know the subscription # of a lot of sites. They can find information/data they previously did not know existed (which I touched on briefly).

I talk about covering the A to Z process for our properties - Google has done the same. They know what end-users are doing (via Google Analytics). They know what end-users are reading and finding interesting (via Google Reader). And now they know how popular blogs are, and what people find interesting on those specific blogs (via Google FeedBurner). And don’t forget they can trick your ad habits now - not just via AdSense/Adwords, but also through DoubleClick now.

Scary.

You read right. When it comes to commenting on blogs, I only bring the A+ thoughts (more about different commenting personas later). And yet adding a comment is becoming more and more annoying.

I don’t always agree with Matt of WordPress, but I have to say his Askimet product is top-notch. I refuse to subscribe to any blog that doesn’t let you comment. At least, if it claims to be a blog. But with all the spam abound these days (we get hammered over at both Blog Top Sites and Blog Flux), keeping comments clean can be tough. And Askimet is an absolute godsend for that.

And so I have decided I hate Typepad. The stupid service makes me enter a captcha every time. Not only is the captcha on a different page (who does that?), but they make me fill out the captcha every damn time. You would think that after commenting over a dozen times without a single comment deleted, they would have the intelligence to add 1+1+1=3 and figure out that same IP, same email, same username = okay person, don’t hassle him. You would imagine with their ‘large-company approach’ they could have a programmer figure out making commenting easier.

I want to comment. But pissing me off (because that is what you are doing, purposefully or not) doesn’t help me.

As an aside, I just came across a weird commenting habit. The blogger, instead of adding his own comment and referring to individual commentators with an @xxx, actually edits the original comment with an ‘—Answer—’. This is rather odd - has anyone else ever come across such a habit? It bugs me because it ‘breaks’ Commentful, so I don’t know if my comment has been replied to or not.

Such odd behaviour.