Are you a fresh new blogger who has wondered whether you could kick start your blog by paying John Chow to review you? Based on the history of two blogs he reviewed in December 2006 and February 2007 — which died– I’d advise against it.
Both Pubincome.com and Allenation.com, now dead, were reviewed by John Chow. Below, you’ll find a plot showing Alexa estimates of their traffic reach. For comparison purposes, I also show my new blog, “BigBucksBlogger”.1 Here are the plots: 
The Blog Kill Effect?
In late December of ‘06, Jason Rodriguez paid John Chow to review the very new pubincome.com. In early January, Jason posted that the review brought his blog a lot of traffic; by March 23, Jason had taken his blog off line.
PubIncome is now dead. May it rest in peace.
On February 7, Allen paid John to review his new blog “Allenation.” In the Alexa graph, you can see Allen’s traffic had increased during the month before the review and then increased more rapidly around Feb. 7 when the review occurred.
At one point, the “reach” noted by Alexa exceeded that of BigBucksBlogger! Imagine getting more than 47 unique visits a day! And without even discussing a topic that really draws in traffic — like knitting!
In the short run, it’s clear Allen was happy with the results and reported a spike in traffic. But, alas, Allen’s traffic dropped precipitously, and for some reason, Allen pretty much stopped posting at Allenation in March 2007. You can read more at Allenation.
Allenation is now dead: May it rest in peace.
Final Analysis
I tried to find other new blogs John Chow may have reviewed more than 3 months ago, but I didn’t find any. If you are aware of any, let me know. I’d love to look at the Alexa plots for those.
Still, based on the results I’ve found, I would advise new bloggers to resist the temptation to buy a ReviewMe by John Chow. The sudden drop after the thrilling rise may kill your blog.
Concentrate on other things– like building good content.
Endnotes:
1. Bear in three things in mind when interpreting the Alexa plot: 1) according to site meter, BigBucksBlogger currently averages 47 unique visits and 91 page views a day, 2) Alexa is a pathetically inaccurate tool but 3) all three blogs are in the “make money niche” which means we can expect our blog visitors to have Alexa toolbars installed.
Ha! I did a review for a guy who lives outside of Toronto. So did John. Why he wanted a home reno site done by John I don’t know but he wasn’t happy at all. In fact John Chow didn’t even write the review and the review was full of links to other sites, and links within Johns blog. That’s not a proper review nor fair to an advertiser who’s paying $400 for a review! All links in that review should be to the advertisers site!
The website he reviewed was:
http://www.remodelingmyspace.com/
I didn’t go looking on John’s site to see what the date was but looking at the Alexa reach the biggest blip is in almost mid April. So that was probably Johns Review (hey maybe mine too). The reach has now tapered off to almost nothing.
Maybe your theory is correct?
I would say that the blog owner/author killed his/her own blog by ordering the review too soon and without building a solid base first. It would appear that after the “john chow effect” wore off the blogger became discouraged by the precipitous drop in traffic.
Check out John Chow’s alexa graph for when he hit digg several times in quick succession. notice that after each spike the traffic level dropped but maintained a higher level than before. By the time he hit the front page of digg he had already built up good content and a decent loyal base.
@tricia– I’ll check the spikes out. I’ll also bear in mind there were several reviews orders at the same time.
@cmanlog — I agree with you that the eager blogger ordered reviews too soon. That’s why I think the “blog killing effect” happens to new bloggers who are deluded enough to think ordering a review will somehow jump start their blog. As I suggested, those people would be better off writing good content and waiting.
I may eventually pay for some advertising. But not before I have plenty of content and have good internal blog organization. If the advertising brings traffic, I want to make it easy for interested visitors to visit more than one page!
Hmm very interesting.
I always read about the positive side of the John Chow Effect not the negative.
Nice observation!
@Ben,
Maybe the reason you only read the John Chow effect is that you read the news on John Chow’s blog!
Hi Lucia;
Great blog you have here! – I will have to refer to it in my other related blogs.
Yes, we had an abysmal review NOT done by John Chow (as mentioned by Tricia above). To clarify for Tricia (who wrote us a huge but great review) we didn’t have him review our website, we had him review our blogging contest – which is why we picked JC, his readers are supposedly bloggers who we thought would enter the contest.
And yes, I’d love to share all our ReviewMe and JC information with you…
As for Alexa toolbar, …please uninstall that worthless, manipulatable piece of crap – it shows you NOTHING relevant to reality. For example, Alexa currently shows us with next to no traffic, BUT we get almost 3000 unique visitors per day (no thanks to JC), and almost 6000 pageviews per day (Google Analytics to prove it), and we’re making almost $150 per day with revenue sources like AdSense and AuctionAds. We got a PR4 within 4 months of going live. Alexa can’t tell you any of that. Also, our April spike was due to having an ABC news affiliate do a story about us: http://kstp.com/article/stories/S74052.shtml
Success in marketing your site online involves WAY more than getting a review by John Chow…
so much so that you could probably ignore him and pretend he doesn’t exist – and STILL be successful – really!
John Chow is not the God he makes himself out to be… simply put, he’s a hack who uses scumbag tactics to artificially inflate metrics he uses to tell you he’s popular.
Hope this helped, thanks for letting me rant!!
Hi Paul,
Thanks for the compliment to my blog. I started doing PPP and learned of Alexa back in April. Then I started this blog.
Anyway, one of the things I find absolutely astonishingly shocking is that ReviewMe, PPP and advertisers pay any attention whatsoever to Alexa. Because my ph.d. thesis involved doing experiments, I always like to at least look at data. I don’t have much, but I quickly looked at data I have, then I wrote:
Alexa, only off by a factor of 20,000?!
I think the bias comes from who installs the extension and that is only people interested in making money with their blog!
I would advise any advertiser to insist on proof of real traffic before paying good money for a review on any blog that in the “make money”, “seo” etc. niche. The Alexa rank is automatically jacked even if the blogger doesn’t try.
The Alexa rank of this blog has overtaken the Alexa of my knitting blog. My knitting blog gets 15 times more traffic than this one. (And my knitting blog is on a dofollow list and gets visited by posties, so it’s rank is jacked compared to knitting blogs!)
I’ll email you privately about data on monday!
[...] will recall that I previously John Chow Effect: Does it Kill Young Blogs? Today, I will discuss the effect of a John Chow Review on a medium sized blog — Gaman’s [...]
Hello there Ms. Big Buck,
I am Allen Heat, owner and author of AlleNation.com. First off let me say that your idea to observe the John Chow effect from a different angel is nice, too bad it was carried out poorly, particularly referring to your hasty observation on AlleNation.
I suppose you haven’t even read AlleNation before posting this article, if you did at least read the latest 2 posts, you’d know exactly the reason why AlleNation wasn’t updated for so long, I guess you thought looking at the last posts’s date was enough.
And one more thing – A nice practice among bloggers who claim to be professional is to let their fellow bloggers know when a well-studied and a comprehensive post like yours is referring to their blog, especially if one is crowning another’s blog “dead”.
I therefore expect you, which I believe is a blogger that understands the importance of proper disclosure, to update this post accordingly when you do find out the reason of my absence, and refer to the corrections in one of your next posts. That, of course – is up to you. Being a guardian angel is just as nice as being a grim reaper – trust me.
Cheers,
Allen.H
Allen,
Thanks for stopping by. I’m not sure what correction you think are required.
John Chow reviewed your blog in early February. You posted quite intermittently until March 20 when you admitted to being unmotivated to blog & etc.
You then stopped posting entirely for 2 months. You finally posted May 20, alerting your readers that you were leaving; then you vanished. By July, when I wrote this, your blog dead in the water and had been for months.
Now that you are back. It appears you posted two days ago. Posting is a very a good first step to resurrecting a dead blog!
On the issue of not contacting you. I apologize I wasn’t able to contact you while you were away in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF.) My blog pings, but the IDF doesn’t happen to accept pings. Lucky for both of us other services track these things, and you managed to discover that I linked you in what appears to be a rather timely fashion.
Good luck with your blog.