A few days ago I noticed my BlogRush widget stopped displaying, I finally decided to look into it today and was greeted by a letter from John Reese (owner) stating they had shut it down.

Blogrush was just about 1 year old, still young in my eyes and was still in beta.

It was definitely popular with bloggers but like a lot of blog services, monetizing it wasn’t easy. It apparently cost around $7000/month to pay for enough servers to operate. Bloggers could install widget on their blog, the widget would then add new posts to a cycle and would display the bloggers post on other blogs with the same tags or interests. This was the source of quite a bit of traffic for some bloggers.

I don’t think the owner is interested in selling, so this maybe a sign that it could come back with a whole new business model and perhaps ways of monetizing it, we’ll have to keep our eyes and ears open.

So if you have the widget installed on your blog, you need to remove it.

As an alternative, check out Blog Catalog.

Sample widget:

Another popular widget for bloggers is Entrecard, they also faced similar issues with monetization a few months ago, but have seemed to rebounded successfully with a few key moves. For example, adding SezWho to their service, posting affiliate banners on member dashboards and more.

Did you use this widget and was it a source of traffic for you?  And, do you think it has the chance to return like I do?