Blogdog.com (formerly Today.com) finally dead?

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   Marisa Wrightposted 13 years ago

   It looks like blogdog.com has disappeared off the face of the earth!
   
   Does anyone know what happened?

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      WryLiltposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      I haven't heard of it so checked it on the waybackmachine. Last cache was 2007. Looks like a cheap low quality blogging host? Or did my random googlings misinform me?

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         Marisa Wrightposted 13 years agoin reply to this

         Today.com was a free revenue-sharing blogging platform.  Members created a blog and were paid directly by Today.com (i.e. not by affiliates or Adsense)
         
         In its early days, it offered an upfront payment of $1 per 200-word blog post for your first month - I'm sure you'll agree, a pretty good offer for a brand new blog,and a great opportunity to get paid to create backlinks to other work!
         
         If you were smart,you created two blogs and made one post per day for the first month, so you could reach the $50 payout threshold by the end of the first month - because after that you were reliant on cents per page impressions, which were pitiful.  So I took my first $60 payout and stopped adding posts.   I was quickly locked out of the blogs (you had to be active to remain a member), but they kept the content - which suited me as it meant my links stayed live.
         
         I'm glad I didn't do any more work there, because they then sold their domain name to the Today show (it's a big American TV show) for squillions - which meant that all the blogs disappeared!
         
         In fact, all the blog content was transferred to blogdog.com - but (as you'll realise) there was no opportunity to redirect the old sub-domains, so every blogger lost all their link juice and page rank overnight,and had to start again with a new URL.
         
         I always wondered what happened after that - in their shoes I would've been so discouraged I would have given up, but most today.com bloggers were unsophisticated internet users and didn't know any better. 
         
         http://todayexiles.blogspot.com/

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            WryLiltposted 13 years agoin reply to this

            That does not sound good. After reading that and hearing about eHow I keep hoping that hubpages never changes or decides to sell out!

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               Marisa Wrightposted 13 years agoin reply to this

               It just goes to show that the only really safe option is to have your own sites. 
               
               I suspect Today.com was losing money big time - they were allowing anyone to blog about anything and everything and paying them $1 per short post.  They didn't seem to have much idea how to make money online, honestly.

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                  WryLiltposted 13 years agoin reply to this

                  Yes, since you said most internet users weren't tech savvy, I doubt that anything was being written with good keyword or SEO content. And $50 for a month is a lot of money when a lot of people do it!
                  
                  I keep meaning to work more on my own sites, but hubpages just pays so much better and gets search engine traffic so much faster!

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                     Marisa Wrightposted 13 years agoin reply to this

                     Yes, at that stage I wasn't earning $50 a month from HubPages so it was well worth it for me - especially as I deleted my failed Blogger blogs and just re-used all the posts!!
                     
                     BTW that was an interesting exercise - Today.com paid for original content only, and definitely checked to make sure before paying.  However I was able to delete my blog posts and re-use them only a week later without a problem.  Of course, it may well be that my old blogs weren't even indexed!

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      iamalegendposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      Yap.Looks like is dead

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   Uninvited Writerposted 13 years ago

   I hope so because I kept getting emails to approve comments (all spam) yet I couldn't sign in to do it.
   
   I did reach the $50 but they cancelled my account just before payout.

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