John Reese & Blogrush Want To Resell Your Data

Author: Jim Kukral Category: Blogging, Privacy

Saturday
Sep 15, 2007

In my last post I wrote about how I didn’t think Blogrush would work and how I didn’t like it.

One question I asked was “what is Blogrush going to do with my stats they collect from me using this widget?”

The answer is in the privacy policy. They’re going to aggregate it and resell it or use it as data for Income.com, a new site launched by super marketer John Reese. (Bold emphases below is mine).

Like most website operators, Income.com collects non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. Income.com’s purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how Income.com’s visitors use its website. From time to time, Income.com may release non-personally-identifying information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its website.

Look, if you want to give up valuable real estate on your blog for a few new visitors every week, while they use your stats to build their other product… then good for you. But it seems like a raw deal to me.

John, how about a cut of that data you’re going to reuse or resell? I’ll take that for using this widget. I know how valuable that is.

I dunno, I feel insulted by this. Is it just me? Have I been in the blog game too long?

Share:

Comments

Martin Neumann

September 17th, 2007 at 6:33 am

Yes, you’ve been too long in the game, Jim. ;-)

It doesn’t surprise me what’s in store with BlogRush. This is valuable data that they’re getting off the backs of many bloggers.

I wouldn’t expect anything less as they’re in this to make money (fair enough) - it’s just that bloggers should better understand the ins-and-outs of this system.

John Reese

September 17th, 2007 at 9:38 am

Jim,

John Reese here. Thanks for the constructive criticism. Good or bad we appreciate all the feeback we can to make BlogRush the best it can be to benefit bloggers and help them generate more targeted traffic.

For the record, we have ZERO plans to use people’s traffic data. The only data we may end up using is the click-rate data to publish a “most popular” type of list showing what’s getting attention in each category. We plan to publish this information on a “sister” site to help generate even more traffic to our bloggers’ blogs. But we’re very concerned with privacy and know our users don’t want their individual blog traffic data exploited. Even, though, there are plenty of services out there that are somewhat able to do that anyway (i.e. Compete, ComScore, etc.) it’s not something that appeals to us and is actually something that we feel would piss off our users.

Thanks again.

John Reese

Jim Kukral

September 17th, 2007 at 9:48 am

Hey John, thanks for clearing that up. I’m glad to hear you won’t be reselling the data you’ve gathered. I will update my post.

I still think the product isn’t going to be worth it for most bloggers, but hey, not everyone can like everything! I understand what you’ve built but I can’t figure out why you’ve built it.

If you’re not reselling the data, I’m guessing it’s to collect a “list” of people to promote something else to monetize down the road. I know you don’t do anything without a money making reason… that’s what you do. Nothing wrong with that.

Patches and Hacks

September 18th, 2007 at 9:16 am

There are a lot of sites that posts statistics about the trends in visitor browsers or operating systems and no one complains about it. They may even sell that to their advertisers to help then target better..again no one complains about that as long it’s non-personally-identifying

Danny @ Blogs For Money

September 21st, 2007 at 12:24 pm

One question I asked was â€œwhat is Blogrush going to do with my stats they collect from me using this widget?â€

Personally I don’t care what they do with stats they collect - they’re providing a service and they should reap any benefits they can while they’re at it. If they don’t succeed, the users all lose out, so I don’t see why their users would want them to fail or not make money!