Lycos (Tripod) Goes a Blogging

[Brett_Tabke]

[boston.internet.com...]

Tripod, the Web publishing unit of Terra Lycos (Quote, Company Info), is rewarding subscribers of its online publishing service with Web log software at no extra charge.

[keyplyr]

On the one hand, it's commendable for Tripod to enhance the features their homepage builders are receiving. On the other, this might be clever way to get thousands of members to upgrade to higher bandwidth accounts to pay for additional data transfer or storage. Homepage builders are particularly fond of posting photos and images and since the blog software comes with this feature, it can be assumed that bandwidth usage would increase per account.

Just what the internet needs, millions more pages that look like they've been stamped from a mold.

[jleland]

Any views that blogs are worth the effort in terms of generating traffic?

[cfx211]

I can't access any of their featured blogs so it looks like this service still has some bugs to work out.

I don't think blogging is designed as an upsell for tripod, rather it is a retention tool. People who blog tend to do it fairly regularly, much more often than people update personal websites. This is because it is fairly simple to add another entry to a blog, it is an increment to an existing page not an entirely new one.

Anyway I bet the folks over at tripod were wondering how to keep their churn rates down, saw some usage stats like this,

[livejournal.com...]

are hoping that their blogs will get used as often, and people will end up renewing. Notice it is only available to their paying members.

Does anyone know how many people are paying for tripod or geocities right now?

[Beto_Stone]

Hey jleland, I have a little bit of experience trying to use blogs to generate traffic.

Our product was aimed at teens and we wanted to get an "endorsement" from teen bloggers. We felt if teens saw their peers using the product it would lend a certain credibility beyond a traditional interactive ad unit.

We utilized two blogs, one averages close to 2,200 unique and the other around 1,000 unique visitors a day. The bloggers had a photo of them using the product and a link to our microsite. Over a 30 day campaign we only got 45 visits to the microsite from the blogs.

All in all the campaign was a tremendous success based on the other online ad units, but the blog component was a bit of a disappointment. We are going to try again, I will keep you posted if we see any success.