John Reese posted this article on the BlogRush website:

After careful consideration, we have decided to shutdown the BlogRush service. If you have the widget code on your blog you will need to remove it.

When BlogRush launched in late-2007 it spread like wildfire all over the Web. Thousands of bloggers were talking about it and the service exploded to become one of the fastest growing free services in the history of the Web. During the first year of the service it successfully served 3.4 Billion blog post headlines and the BlogRush widget could be found on blogs all over the world; even up until the moment we closed down the service.

BlogRush didn’t grow without its fair share of problems — from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected. We also had some problems with trying to fairly control the quality of the network, and in the process made many mistakes in deciding what blogs should stay or go. All of these issues, ultimately, limited the service’s full potential.

Our team worked very hard to try and build a service that would truly help bloggers of all sizes get free traffic to their blogs. This was our primary focus. Not once did we ever try to monetize the service with ads or anything else. BlogRush never made a single penny in revenue. We wanted to be able to help our users FIRST and then worry about monetizing the service later. Unfortunately, the service didn’t work out like we had hoped. (It happens.)

I want to say “Thank You” to all of the great bloggers that at least gave BlogRush a test to see if it would work for them. We sincerely appreciate you giving the service a try.

We have received several offers & inquiries about acquiring BlogRush, but we are choosing not to go that route. While many might think this is crazy, we truly feel it’s the ‘right’ thing to do for our users. Believe it or not, it’s not always about the money. In fact, BlogRush will have lost a small fortune when it’s all said and done, and it was by choice. There were many things we could have done to monetize the service but we wanted to make sure it was going to benefit our users first.

Last but not least I want to say that I hope the failure of this service doesn’t in any way discourage other entrepreneurs from coming up with crazy ideas at 4AM (like I did with this one) and from “going for it” to just try and see if something will work. Without trying there can be no success. And as we all know, ideas are worthless without action. The Web wouldn’t be what it is today without entrepreneurs trying all sorts of crazy ideas.

On behalf of the entire BlogRush team, we wish the best of luck to everyone with their own blogs, ideas, and crazy ventures.

Sincerely,

John Reese

So farewell to a useful but unsuccessful idea.

Brian Gardner, the author and creator of the very popular Revolution WordPress premium themes, has announced that he will be releasing all future Revolution themes as open source under the GPL License and in accordance with WordPress standards. This change is set to take effect on Saturday, November 1st.

Explaining why he has decided to go open source, Brian says:

Jason Schuller, who runs WP Elements as well as created the Featured Content Gallery plugin, will be teaming up with me on the upcoming Revolution project. His creativity and resources will be a huge asset to Revolution and the community. He and I will both be developing themes, and all of them will be made available on the upcoming site. He also has plans to develop more plugins, which will all be housed on the site as well.
Many of you know that a few weeks ago, Jason flew out here to Chicago so we could discuss some things. Well obviously it was all about working together, and our desire to build something in the WordPress community that would be really big. The reason for the delay in our announcement was a result of something I threw out there to him – only hours before he was to fly back to Seattle. “Hey man, what if we released all of our themes open source?” Thus the delay…
Why the change of heart?
This one is really simple – more than anything, Jason and I want to develop a resource and community that is perfectly aligned with WordPress. Both he and I have been fortunate enough to leave our day jobs within the past year and have developed our own media companies. None of that would have been possible without the existence of WordPress, which is solely built and supported by the open source community.
It only seems fair that we abandon our current premium theme models, and begin a new way of doing business. I contacted Matt and Toni to see if they would be gracious enough to carve out some time to meet with us, so we could ensure that our business model was in compliance with standards set forth by the authors of the GPL license as well as with WordPress.