I have a long history with topsites. My first ‘big’ site (over 5,000 uniques a day) was Game Sites 200. It was an absolute juggernaut when it came to top lists - just look at these stats. When I sold it a while ago, it was getting over 100,000 unique visitors a day, and its yearly earnings was almost $200,000. That ain’t chump change. To put that in perspective, that is almost 4x the most popular blog on Blog Top Sites. Game Sites 200 generated over 250,000 clicks for the consistently top-voted sites.

I soon tired of the vote based system. Voting was a flawed mechanism. Because GS200 was such a source of traffic, often times webmasters would take their own websites hostage and demand visitors vote for them or that the site would be shutdown. Its both humbling and annoying - humbling in the sense that your website is so important, and annoying because people are inconveniencing users under your name. Throw in popups, spammers, bots, trick votes, and you have a recipe for a headache.

So when Jacob started to talk to me about working together on something, a topsites for blogs is what came to my mind. We would use Jacob’s network & my programming knowledge in topsites (I was busy with other stuff at that time) to combine our forces. Shades of Captain Planet.

The product, Blog Top Sites, has been a runaway success. Game Sites 200 was tough because we weren’t the first. For blogs, we were. And after Darren Rowse added us to his sidebar, it just took off. According to Technorati, we have over 10,500 links. Just counting our four most popular categories (Entertainment, Personal, Technology, and 1,000,000 for Blog Catalog and (almost) 1,000,000 for Blog Flux Directory puts Blog Top Sites in rare company.

But that isn’t the point. The point is how all I keep getting is copied. Over and over and over.

With Game Sites 200 there are dozens of toplists that copied every single category of Game Sites 200. Everytime we added a new category, it would magically appear on all the others. Ultimate Top 200 went so far as to use the exact same design as us (our old design), the exact same menu structure/style, and everything else in between. To add a bit of irony, they use evoTopsites, a product we created (before we spun off Evo-Dev) but did not actually use for Game Sites 200.

And the same thing exists with Blog Top Sites. Dozens of clones, that have all copied our categories and our appearance and our structure. Even our site details and what not is ripped off. I state this categorically because I modified the Blog Top Sites look from the original evoTopsites look. And yet they all look like Blog Top Sites.

Of course, none of them match the amount of traffic Blog Top Sites tracks. But still - annoying. Do something new!