A few minutes ago, I pointed by my browser to the Daily Radar Blips sites with the intention of dropping a link to my last post here on Marketing Pilgrim. This is what I found:
Apparently Future US, the parent company of Daily Radar, has pulled the plug on the entire network including BallHype, ShowHype and my beloved TVBlips. Seriously? Just like that?
I took a turn around the internet and Twitter and was surprised to find that it wasn’t a big topic of conversation. Few people seem to have noticed the closure and maybe that, right there, explains it all.
Daily Radar was a niche version of Digg. Instead of adding your links to a general pot, you added them to a specific “blips” portal individually or by way of a feed. They had a site for TV, music, politics, green living, webmarketing, technology and all the major sports. There had to be at 30 – 50 sites in the network and now there are none.
Websites close everyday, though not as often as they used to, but this no notice closure is particularly annoying because Daily Radar was a community site. It wasn’t written by staff members. I know this because I was a staff member a few years ago. We kept the sites neat and tidy, but the content was provided by the thousands of blog feeds that were listed across all the niche sites.
Once you became a member, there was friending and following and voting stories up and down and commenting. . .you know. . .a community. People. People like me who both enjoyed reading the sites and learned to depend on it as a means of marketing my posts.
I suppose there are numerous legitimate business reasons for not alerting the world that a site is about to go dark. I also supposed that I wouldn’t feel any better about losing a site I visited on a regular basis if I knew about it ahead of time. Still, it would be nice to hear an explanation, even if it is the standard, we weren’t making enough money. The parent company, Future US, is a major publisher of gamer and computer magazines, which has to be a tough sell these days. Things are changing so fast, how can there be any new news in a computer magazine that has to be written three months before publication? Maybe the downturn in magazine sales meant that the budget had to be slashed and Daily Radar took the bullet.
Maybe in the next few days, more news on the whys and wheres will come to light. But for me, it’s a sad day. Daily Radar sites are on the referrers list on every one of my websites and I will be hard pressed to find a replacement. Maybe the new Digg will take their spot? I doubt it, but I’ll give it a try.
Were you a Daily Radar blip site user? What are your thoughts on the no-notice shut down?
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