As you know for the last 9 months, I’ve been diligently killing myself serving as Bloguin’s CEO. It’s no easy task and I think some of you industry insiders who read my blog can probably imagine the work that goes into maintaining and growing a blog network with no investment capital.
Often its quite a mentally taxing but along the way its good to take pride in certain accomplishments along the way. Below are some that I’m particularly proud of.
So what’s this screenshot? Two things actually. First I recently noticed that some of our writers have added additional writing positions and gigs. No jealous girlfriend syndrome here. The logos you see in the screenshot above are places we have writers doing part time work. These are not companies that are just linking to or discussing our writers and sites, but places that feature our writers. Very impressive.
The other thing this screenshot shows is the tremendous ad performance/targeting we have achieved of late. If you look above you’ll see we have ads on that page from ESPN and Nike. Having mainstream brands have ads on your site is nothing to brag about, but these two advertisers are perfectly targeted to our network and are paying great rates to Bloguin and our publishers. In fact as May winds down it looks like 40% of our ads will have been filled with ads from ESPN, Nike, Gatorade, Wheaties, and MasterCard. That’s just a tremendous accomplishment and something that takes a lot of work behind the scenes. A quick looks shows we also had a good portion of ads from Versus earlier in the month promoing the hockey playoffs.
Another sign of our success can be found in this screenshot below.
What you’re looking at here is how large Bloguin’s network audience is over the last 30 days. A year ago it was a hair of 200,000 unique visitors. This month its over 900,000 and you have to take into consideration 90% of the NHL and NBA are no longer playing and the NFL and most major college sports are out of season. This is essentially a slow time for us….. but its not.
You could credit a lot of different factors for that, but at the end of the day our writers are the most critical component of Bloguin’s growth. To that I say thank you for all your hard work. Our team is grinding hard and earning well deserved promotion from SI’s Hot Clicks, Deadspin, Twitter, print publications, and experiencing organic growth as well. In fact we’ve even had some of our sites promoted on television like this clip from today.
Larry at Wezen Ball is just an unbelievably talented and creative writer. I am consistently wowed by his work but he is just one of many people who I am proud to be working with and thankful for their commitment in Bloguin.
