June - A Bloggin Income Update

Dear Joe,

I'm sorry to have to inform you that we've had difficulties with our major investor in Buzzfuse (solely because he has had difficulties with his bankers), and as a result Buzzfuse is immediately technically insolvent. 

After 24 months of building Buzzfuse, and watching subscribers grow 11x in the last six record months alone, you can imagine how this feels...

What this means:

- We are scrambling to stay alive in some form. What we are trying to do is keep Buzzfuse alive as a free service and find alternate investors/partners.

- However, we have no cash and have cut back on ALL costs. 

- Our team remain committed to the project and will work after hours and weekends (they are seeking employment elsewhere). So we'll keep fixing those bugs if you keep finding them :)

As a premium subscriber, this means that:

(a) We will not be in a position to pay the creator rewards for the same months. Our bank accounts are literally several 100K negative.

(b) We will refund you for any subscriptions received in the period April-July 2008, so at the very least these last few months will not have cost anything. This will be done in the next few days, including changes to the home page etc.

(c) We will attempt to resurrect the premium service should we find another investor/partner in future.

In the meantime, we'd like to thank you for your support and to ask that you keep using the normal service (and finding those bugs).

Yours sincerely,

g (and the Buzzfuse team)

...WTFudge?  So, basically, I used a month worth of my time and energy to give this company props and all I get out of it is a refund?  Here is my theory: Joeprah's awesomeness broke their system.  When BuzzFuse was constructed they never thought about, oh, well...me owning it.  This total lack of planning on their part obviously shook their company to its foundation.  I feel more than a little scammed by them and their claims especially since one of the owners of the company was submitting posts and one of the top earners overall (conflict of interest?--see hell yeah).  I apologize, on behalf of BuzzFuse's complete and total horridness, to anyone who rated or commented any of my posts at BuzzFuse because it was apparently for nothing. 

But Joeprah, you said you made more money this month with your blog--tell me how.  

First, AdSense: $11.55 (not too shabby--getting close to a paycheck)

Second, Text Link Ads: $38.54 (eh...)

Third, TheExaminer : $55.00 (hmm...)

Fourth, Graco for my video services: $700.00 (yeah baby!)

So, even without the windfall from BuzzFuse I made $805.09 for the month of June!  I mean, I suppose if you measure that against the amount of time I lost to BuzzFuse I should, by all rights, be pissed, but I'll take it.  The Graco thing is a one time thing and it was actually a stipend or per-diem, but it still came from the blog so I am counting it.  Overall July will be slower, but we'll see what the final tally is. 

Word.