BlogBurst Outrage: Broken Promises; Nation’s Newspapers Continue Stealing Bandwidth (part 3)

We are continuing our coverage of the BlogBurst bamboozlement — a parasitic company’s abuse of independent internet publishers, and major newspapers’ despicable behaviour of becoming thieves of bloggers’ bandwidth.
Earlier, we raised the issue of compensation. Pluck, the company behind the BlogBurst service, tells that the compensation for bloggers is in returning clicks and in branding.
Well, let’s see about that, using a case study. Vagablogging.net, created by Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, was promoted by Pluck as one of the best examples of quality journalism that BlogBurst can deliver to newspaper publishers (see the press release).
So let’s see what Potts gets in return for giving away his stuff for free to others to make a profit and being robbed by the newspapers of his bandwidth. Here’s a link to Vagablogging stats over at ExtremeTracking.
Even though Potts’ blog has been all over SFGate.com for more than a week, he has failed to generate even 62 clicks over that period of time (62 clicks is the lowest that ExtremeTracking will display.) The truth is, SFGate.com is not even listed as a referrer to his website. Apparently, once you give away your entire content, there’s no incentive for readers to venture to the original website. Another broken promise.
What about the branding? It’ll take more time to bear this out, but we’re not optimistic. We bet the only positive brand-association going on in readers’ minds is toward the newspapers, which are running quality blog content without providing meaningful compensation to the authors.
References: SFgate.com/travel
Flashbacks: They Own the Aggregator, Now (They Think) They Own the Content; Beware BlogBurst: A “Derivative Work” Decoy; Nation’s Main Newspapers Continue to Steal Bloggers’ Bandwidth (part 2).