Buzzfuse, content marketing and promotion?
Buzzfuse, a South African based internet startup is a promotion engine for your content. The features are a mix between social bookmarking where popular content is promoted to the home page, an aggregator of media, social networking and they also throw in some reporting and stats.
The site allows a content creator (blogs, music, images etc.) to market their content. A basic account is free which allows you up to 50 fans. Your fans are automatically notified about new content and it is then promoted to the home page based on a secret algorithm. The rating is most likely based on the number of hits, comments,votes and click troughs from the buzzfuse site. In addition premium account holders get a chance to earn money from a pool of up to $5,000.
The site has a unique concept, but from a user perspective Social bookmarking sites seem more useful since they contain content from just about any site and every member acts as a filter on what quality is. Sites like Sturvs pretty much have content promotion down with the embedded video and audio. I realized that Sturvs was going down the content promotion route and hinted at that in the review.
With buzzfuse the top earner for the month has 2 posts related to Yuwie (a social networking website which pays you to network, a business model that you could never take seriously). The most popular posts in the last month are also Yuwie based posts. Now with the business model as it stands it seems to be attracting the ‘make money online by selling an ebook about online marketing which then tells you how to sell the same ebook to other people’ (pyramid scheme) crowd.
Having said that i did manage to find one interesting website, which is a self published comic strip. Only quality content will attract users and keep them coming back.
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Comments
Gareth,
Thank you for the response, however according to your FAQ at http://www.buzzfuse.com/info/faq it states:
“Unlimited fans:
Premium accounts have no limit on the number of fans. Basic accounts can only have up to 50 fans per creator. ”
As long as you keep out the get rich quick online ppl, and get quality content i believe the site has potential. So keep modifying and lets see some quality content. Keep well.
/I
[...] initial review of buzzfuse was by far the most negative i have done, and i hate to do that since the goal of this [...]
Hi Ismail.
Thanks for the review.
There is an error I’d like to point out - free accounts have no limits on the number of fans. The main differences between free and premium accounts are that premium accounts have no file size or storage limits on photos or music, premium users can use Buzzfuse as a survey tool (a survey can be included in each post) and that premium users are eligible for reward from our monthly rewards pool.
The algorithm is secret, but its weightings are gathered from the preferences of each user. There is a specific form to provide input on this under ‘Secret Formula’ on Buzzfuse.
Lastly, as to the content on the system and our intentions: We designed Buzzfuse to help serious creators market their work online, and as means of transforming consumer attention into value for the creator. In the past few months we’ve been testing the system and making substantial improvements. We’ve also seen how people use the system to game it, and not surprisingly, we’ve seen some of the Yuwie crowd (an approach we don’t endorse) try Buzzfuse to make money. We’re still sorting through the April and May results to try remove the bias from these interactions, but I’d expect you see the bias removed shortly and the top quality content coming through.
Lastly, in about a week you’ll see the ability for any user to share any item/page discovered out there on Buzzfuse. This part of the system is currently being coded.
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