Launched in 2006, BlogCharm promised to pay bloggers for blogging at the site, another variation on the blog network theme. Bloggers were paid on a straight 50% rev share based on revenue made against their content from a mixture of CPM ads and Adsense units.
According to a BlogCharm member who contacted TechCrunch, they have been waiting months to be paid, and despite sending multiple emails have never received a response. A quick search of the BlogExplosion forums finds more members who have never been paid, with payments due since December 2006. There’s no shortage of people outside of the BlogExplosion forums who have bad things to say about BlogCharm as well; WebUpon reported in June 2007 that “Blogcharm does not pay,” and PaidOpps simply suggested that BlogCharm was a scam.
Ownership of the site isn’t immediately clear. BlogCharm has a powered by Blog Explosion badge on it, there are no contact details aside from an online form located on Blogexplosion and the registration details for the site are hidden by a private proxy service. Blog Explosion on the other hand is registered to West Hollywood based Live Universe and sits on the same server as BlogCharm so it would be reasonable to suggest that Live Universe may well be the owner of both sites. Having said that BlogCharm (along with Blog Explosion) has changed hands at least once, having sold in June 2006 for a reported “six figure” sum, then at least according to the BlogExplosion forums, someone called Chris was tasked with “fixing” BlogExplosion (and we’d presume the other related sites) in November this year. Whether Chris is a new owner or simply an employee given management of the site was not detailed, indeed there was no details other than a name and a promise to fix the mess.
Live Universe was founded by Brad Greenspan, best known as one of the founders of MySpace and in more recent years for his opposition to News Corps acquisition of MySpace. Live Universe runs sites including LiveVideo.com, a top 1000 site online (according to Alexa), BlinkYou.com, Lyrics Download and acquired Flurl.com in October 2006.
I can’t say for certain that the buck stops with Live Universe due to the shaky ownership history of BlogCharm and Blog Explosion; whether they purchased the site in June 2006 or have only just purchased it now, or even offloaded it (based on the Chris comments) is not clear, but at some stage or another (presuming the registration details are legitimate) Live Universe may have been involved with the site and bloggers weren’t paid. We’ve asked Live Universe for comment and if they respond we’ll happily update the post, but ultimately someone must take responsibility for BlogCharm. The site is still taking new members today; I found bloggers writing about joining the site on the promise of getting paid in the last few weeks. Given that the site has failed to pay its members in the past, at the very least new membership applications should cease until such time that the outstanding payments are made, or if they are not to be forthcoming the site shut completely and creditors paid from any sale.
I know because I was one of their network victims, I got paid after 2 months even tho I should of been the first month, well at least I got paid unlike other blog networks that never paid me. No wonder only few of such “advertising-publishing” companies make it that far.
~ LiveCrunch
FWIW, according to Alexa the “company details” are:
Thomas Dalberg
Von Der Ohes Vei 1
Bergen, Hordaland 5035,
NORWAY
Phone: 93068518
domain [at] dalbergonline.no
Stupid BlogCharm
BlogCharm SmogShmarm lol
Not again!
This is very sad.
I’m actually one of the original founders of BlogExplosion/BlogCharm (along with Thomas) and the fact that BlogCharm isn’t paying their members is disturbing.
We sold our blog network (BlogExplosion/BlogCharm) a couple of years ago to LiveUniverse (Brad and group), whereby we made payments to all BlogCharm members before handing the site over. (that was a couple of years ago…)
So this has nothing to do with Thomas as we’ve long since moved on. I know over a year ago that they made payments to BlogCharm members because they were way behind and it looks like they are doing it (not paying members) again….
Since we sold the site, everything has been badly neglected. It’s frustrating to watch something you’ve put tons of time into, degrade to nothing.
I hope they do the right thing and pay BlogCharm members.. that or simply sell the site and let someone that cares keep it going properly.
If any screwed blog charm bloggers want to try something else, at hubpages you can write about almost anything and you get paid directly by the affiliates (mainly adsense) through impression sharing. Total transparency.
Our blogging network has never missed a payment to our authors. How sad to punish the heart of your business.
I ranted more about it here…
http://blogs.te...y-our-bloggers/
Thanks for publicizing about this problem. I’m one of the affected members who has been waiting for payments since December 2006. I hope your inquiries prompt them into action.
I’ve been slowly losing faith in LiveUniverse for months. I am/was a relatively popular user on their Livevideo.com site (www.livevideo.com/traegorn), and for months they’ve been teasing users with a reLaunch… and then doing nothing. The site is seemingly dissolving (which has led to my inactivity there over the last couple of months)
My impression is that LiveUniverse builds things, hypes them up, and then lets them die.
At this time blogs are living encyclopedia of the virtual world
Blogcharm and Blogexplosion have been without admin since more than 3 months now.
LiveUniverse still owns both BE and BC but are looking for someone to take over. At $125k (that was the price 2 months ago).
Next joke.
I was approached earlier this year by someone at Live Universe about posting video to Livevideo.com. Their whole intro pitch consisted of “it’s run by Brad Greenspan, the founder of MySpace.” Their initial terms sounded great – fair revenue split, good CPM, etc. As we got into the details, it was obviously a sucker deal and we would never see any revenue. When I sent them a counter-proposal, I received an incredibly rude response. Even on better financial terms, I would never do business with that company.
@Brad (#13) I’ve had 3 sales agreements with liveuniverse, concerning BlogExplosion, in February 2007. Every time they wanted to know if we could pay within 24 hours. I wished they could get their act together and get paper work done within 24 days!
5 Months after those 3 ‘agreements’ they asked me if I still were interested. 2 Months ago they tried again.
Deal with the negotiator and then hear that Mr. Green$pan doesn’t want to make a financial loss. Yeah, right.
Let’s just put the whole concept of paid posts in the “if it sounds too good to be true…” bucket.
“LiveUniverse, Inc.” was shown as registrant before they protected the whois information in September.
It seems every site they buy dies…
I know they bought http://www.dumpalink.com for over 1 mil which was one of there first buys and now that site is just crap…
…. because they were never going to anyway!
SUCKERS!
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
I’m glad to see this issue is getting some circulation. I am owed close to $200 from BlogCharm–money that this poor college student could have really used for the holidays. I spent one whole week creating the base content and get a ton of visitors daily. They’re just pocketing the money.
Class action lawsuit seems like the only way to recover these funds.
What do you think? Is class action reasonable? There are over a thousand members, none of whom have been paid for almost a year now.
Seems as though, given the connection to Omnidrive, TechCrunch should be expending the same energy looking into these allegations:
http://www.read...or_deadpool.php
More specifically those as outlined by the former CTO:
http://www.read...p#comment-28206
Well?
Duncan, please contact me regarding this story. I have some information you will enjoy.
thanks for sharing these reports.
Blogcharm has announced on its site that it’s discontinuing its service as of January 1, 2008. Unfortunately, they’ve already disabled everybody’s blogs, so if that was your main blog, you’ve not only lost all the advertising you provided for Blogcharm on your space, but you’ve lost all your hard work. Furthermore, if you haven’t placed a valid ($10 or more USD) claim with them, you’re not going to be paid.
Yes, we were given no warning at all that they would be discontinuing blogcharm. Supposedly they are still going to pay us (if we had at least $10 in our account). They owe me $20, which isn’t a fortune, but I moved my blog there since they said they were paying people to blog, and they should do so. That first $10 has been owed to me since December 2006, the other $10 since January 2007. We shall see if they will really do it or not. I can get to my blog content through cached contents on Google, but I lost a draft of something I was working on; also, I really don’t appreciate the complete lack of warning before my blog was disabled. I would seriously advise against doing any business with Live Universe.
I was very upset when I couldn’t access my articles on BlogCharm. After stewing a while, I was happy to remember Google’s ability to cache website info. If you’re an old BlogCharm blogger and would like access to your info, search Google for your individual blog and then click the cached link.
site:blogcharm.com
or click this link and look for your blog:
http://www.goog...amp;btnG=Search
Well, miracle of miracles, I did get paid the $20 I was owed through Paypal. The payment came from Live Universe, so I guess they are still the owners.