b5 & 9rules or 4pples & 0ranges

Well 9rules has been profitable for many months now — 9rules and 9rules-related work pays for my house, my sports car, my fiancee’s gigantic ring… ;) ;)

There’s a lot of value in joining 9rules. Normally when we announce a new blog we push a few thousand readers over there instantly and then push RSS subscribers up pretty high as well.

We basically have two major functions: bring more recognition to budding authors with great sites, and provide readers a place to find great content all at once. So many people come to 9rules.com trusting us to find great content that we take that responsibility very seriously.

“Second, the community (9r) you are espousing creates an aura of elitism? So while you create a bond amongst yourselves, you also pile up a tall wall between your community and the rest of the blogosphere.”

I think if we were putting up walls, you wouldn’t see hundreds and hundreds of people apply to join 9rules, over 75 comments and trackbacks on our Round 5 entry, or about 100 people guessing how many people will apply this round. Every time we let the flood gates open, many more people want to join 9rules — I see that as people thinking we’re doing a positive thing rather than just building up walls :)

Hey Rickey, yup! Business Logs is the consulting arm of 9rules — we work with a lot of internet startups and larger companies on user interface design, blog consulting, knowledge management, fun stuff like that.

Dave, I’m actually pretty confused by your comment so I’ll try and respond the best I can.

“For Mr. Rundles and the rest of the 9r cognoscenti … before crowing on how many people line up to join you it might be wise to ask … who are these people and what life do they have aside from sitting in a basement and writing content to finance your fiancees engagement ring?”

These people are college professors, students, entrepreneurs, accomplished writers, cartoonists, scientists, ministers, cooks, etc. They write for their blog because they love the medium and 9rules helps them get more recognition. We don’t ask anything from them (they can write about whatever they want, their design can be anything they want, ads or no ads, they have total control) and in return we give them more more traffic and recognition, give them the opportunity to find new clients, get full-time jobs, and many other things.

“Pretty smug comment, I thought since I know the founders/managers of b5 did not take any salary back out of the business for the first year, at least.”

Because they had to pay their dozens and dozens of writers first, and had little leftover. We don’t own any of our members’ content so we don’t pay them, therefore we have little overhead, which has let us be profitable from the start.

“9rules seems to exist to get insiders to join their fraternity, b5 seems to exist to put up blogs that the general public will read … and thus gain value from the content and, oh yes, click on some ads from time to time.”

9rules exists to boost the traffic and recognition of great independent blogs from around the world, and also provide a centralized location for readers to find great content on their favorite topics. I’m not sure why you consider that a negative thing :)

Member benefit from boosted traffic because if they run ads on their site the traffic obviously makes them more money. The traffic also builds them a larger audience, more comments, more links, more credibility, and lots of other stuff.