Mike Rundle on branding and the future of 9rules

An Interview by Thord Daniel Hedengren

If you have been even remotely close to the blogosphere the last year, then you’ve most likely seen the 9rules leaf on quite a few blogs. Some of them quite prominent on top of that, like Lorelle on Wordpress for instance, as good as any.

The leaf belongs to the blog network 9rules, as you probably know. I wouldn’t call them a blog network though, since their model is quite different from, say b5media. To me, 9rules is somewhat of a riddle, since it isn’t obvious where they are going, and what the big masterplan is.

With the ongoing debate on blog network branding, where they are going, the boringness factor, and so on. With all that in mind, I got in touch with Mike Rundle of 9rules. He had some interesting things to say.

First of all, congratulations on the recent Round 5! 1,190 applications is kind of staggering, how do you manage them all? Is there a formula?
Thanks! Yeah it is pretty large, over at our Round 5 number game I guessed 853 and honestly I didn’t think we’d make it but I suppose I underestimated the word of mouth of our members and readers. There isn’t a formula, but we talked a lot before this round about what we look for in a site – consistency, personality, writing quality, etc. – so those are the key factors. It’s definitely taking awhile to go through them though, hopefully in the next week or so we’ll be in a better position.

And you’re adding every blog that’s good enough, correct, not a set percentage or something like that? Does traffic matter, by the way?
Right on, there’s never a set percentage even though a lot of people like to ask us about that. Typically we’ve added about 15% in the previous rounds however this round there are a lot of great sites so who knows what the overall percentage will turn out to be. Traffic doesn’t matter at all, in fact some of our most active members in the 9rules community were the ones with the smallest amount of traffic before they were added. Traffic and popularity don’t matter at all, just your content.

9rules is a heavy brand and lots of bloggers dream about adding the famous leaf to their site. But how does being added to the network really help the bloggers out? Do you drive that much traffic to them, for instance?
We do drive traffic, not in the Digg sense, but in the consistent sense where each person is clicking over because they’re actually interested in what that writer has to say and will probably subscribe via RSS. After announcing Chad Lapa’s 22dollars.com his RSS subscriber base nearly quadrupled in a matter of days through the “9rules effect.” Typically when you’re introduced you get the big surge of people surfing over from our blog (about 2k subscribers) and then as our caching infrastructure reels up and you start getting rotating placement on the homepage and on community pages, you get a lot of extra traffic as you post new content. Whenever I write a new entry at Business Logs I get a few hundred referral hits from the 9rules homepage instantly, so it’s pretty helpful. Our impact is more in the long-term, where you can look back at the last 3-6 months on your blog and see how being introduced at 9rules helped set-off your traffic organically.

Regardless of how much traffic we send our members, they consistently tell us that it’s not the traffic that they love about 9rules, it’s the people they meet and the opportunities we present them. The members of 9rules are venture capitalists, CEOs, entrepreneurs, professors, scientists, world-renowned designers and developers, music producers – not just people looking to get paid some money for blogging. Because you get to directly interact with this A-List group many of our members have found new jobs, secured VC or angel funding, found clients or designs for new projects, or just met acquaintances that can help 24 hours a day. It still amazes me when somebody posts the most in-depth Ajax or Ruby on Rails question in our forums and it’s instantly answered by at least 5 people within 15 minutes.

Connections are always valuable of course, but it almost sound like a cult. I guess that’s not necessarily bad though, especially when it comes to forums. Is there a risk that the group becomes too self-centered?
Well I think 9rules would only be considered a cult if we were preaching to our members, telling them what to say and how to think, and we definitely don’t do that. 9rules is just like any other organization that has membership criteria, we’re free to accept who we think fits best and everyone else is free to either want to join or sit on the sidelines, it’s totally up to them. Many of our members lead the development of various open source projects like Wordpress, we’re still organizing 9charities.org (our non-profit organization that designs websites for charities for free), we have meetups around the country where anybody can come and hang out, our Facebook group has a ton of non-members in it, so we do a lot of things that involve people other than 9rules members. One of the main goals of 9rules actually has little to do with our actual members, and that’s putting great content in the hands of anyone on the Web who wants to read it via 9rules.com. Our main audience is made up of non-members so we’d never want to alienate anyone just because they’re not in 9rules.

I’m a bit curious on your Featured section over at 9rules.com – it says it’s edited by the members. How does that work?
Funny you bring this up, because we’re totally revamping our site soon and Featured is getting the boot in lieu of something much cooler called 9rules Live. The Featured blog is written totally by 9rules Community Leaders, individual members who have volunteered to help run their respective Community, so in that case it’s 100% written and edited by our members. The goal was to show off the best content from around 9rules in Featured blog entries, but the “problem” is that when we dropped 9rules Notes over the summer our CLs and members were posting much more often there than in Featured, so we’ve been lacking a bit on the Featured blog.

Well now I have to ask you about 9rules Live, of course. What is it, how does it work, and when will it be launched?
Haha, well 9rules Live is part of the next version of 9rules.com that’s coming soon, hopefully in the next few weeks. It involves major updates to Notes and our Community pages, new ways to browse and interact with member content, and some more cool stuff that nobody’s really done before. We’ve been working hard on evolving the 9rules website into a content platform, where we give anyone the ability to access what they want from wherever they are. 9rules Live will let people get a real-time look into all content being produced at 9rules in a brand new way… that’s all I can say!

The Notes section seems to be quite a success. I get the feeling you’re not really a blog network, more of a social netwo rking community site, with blogs?
Yeah, Notes has absolutely taken off and has been steadily growing in userbase and postings since we launched it. As of right now we have about 700 new topics posted and almost 6,000 comments, but those numbers grow daily. Notes is our bread-and-butter as far as getting new people to the 9rules site, and we have lots of new features slated for it that will hopefully take it to the next level as far as social/user interaction goes. I don’t think of 9rules as a blog network just because that puts such an Old Media stigma on your forehead, but I really like that “social networking community site” idea you just said – has that ring to it!

You can have the expression if you like. Should more blog network launch a forum for their bloggers and readers, or is the risk of undermining the comment sections of the blogs too great?
I think the reason 9rules Notes was so popular was because it’s a forum software backend tied to a blog-like frontend, which lets people feel as though they’re posting blog entries directly to 9rules – something that nobody else is doing. The topics posted to Notes usually average over a dozen comments, where typical network blog entries rarely get that many, so having an active audience to start is important. We have thousands of people who want to join 9rules, so if they don’t make it in they usually hop to 9rules Notes and become a very active participant in that way, which is extremely cool to see.

John Evans over at Syntagma Media thinks blog networks are boring. What do you think? Where are they going, the networks, and where should they be going?
I agree with John on that one, they’re boring because they’re just no real innovation. Most blog networks just take the Old Media publishing model to the web with the same paradigms – authors, readers, editors, etc. – and don’t use any of the great technical and interactive features the web has to offer to make the experience better for their users. I’m still waiting to see blog networks offer the features that 9rules has been offering since Day 1, namely a way to view a full category’s content on one page, or a way to subscribe to a category via RSS and get all their sites in one feed. These features are extremely important if you want readers to actually explore your content comfortably vs. having to click-thru to a site, click back, click-thru to another site, click back, just to find an entry or a site that’s worth reading. I think all blog networks should drop what they’re doing, stop adding new blogs, and immediately focus on how best to get content into the hands of their users because that’s what really matters. I’d really like to see some more user-focused content portals emerge because that’s what people are expecting now. They go to Digg to see a big list of the most popular stories, they head to Techmeme to see the most talked about tech news, they go to Newsvine to read their peers’ takes on news stories, it’s all mashed together and distributed now, and I don’t see how blog networks can afford not to step in that direction.

You’ve been accused (well…) of leaning heavily on the technological aspects and what you’re talking about above are indeed functions. Granted, they are perhaps needed, but still – shouldn’t blog network owners make sure that they have quality content first and foremost?
Anyone starting a company on the Web needs to actually remember they are a Web-based company and take advantage of all the things they can do with the medium. Having high quality content is very important, but once you have some solid blogs why not concentrate on building out your platform, makes it easier for people to actually reach your content. A network could have 100 good sites but if they don’t do their part in connecting them all via a centralized location, or providing users the means to comfortably browse all their content the way that makes sense to them, it’s like driving a Ferrari on flat tires. Everybody has a lot of blogs now, everyone is working hard on getting their content at a high level of quality, so now what? The way to differentiate yourself is to stop catering to your advertisers and start catering to your users, because if your users stop coming then your advertisers will, too. The Web medium is now very mature – we have dozens of technologies all geared towards the easy organization and presentation of related content – so I think blog networks need to start actively pursuing these and start providing users with what they want. Regardless of if your content is about design, technology, marketing, gossip, business, relationships, the readers of those topics all want the same thing and that’s the ability to take in content in a way that makes sense to them.

What about branding? 9rules and the leaf are strong brands, but your blog network is a patchwork of various individuals and their blogs. Doesn’t that make it all hard to handle?
I think it would be difficult to manage the 9rules brand if we didn’t completely trust our members, if we were constantly worrying about people making us look bad then it would be tough to handle but that’s not the case. Our members are really proud to sport the 9rules badge on their site and love to tell their readers what they think of us, and that’s the best brand support we could ever ask for.

It’s difficult for normal blog networks to work on their brand because you can’t build your reputation by having people on your payroll give positive feedback, you’re paying them money to write for you, of course they’ll be saying positive things. I’ve rarely seen someone not affiliated with a blog network write long, gushy posts proclaiming their love for that network totally unprovoked, but at 9rules that happens pretty often. You can’t buy your way into 9rules (someone offered me a few thousand dollars this round, sorry buddy!) or sweet talk us into letting you in, it’s all about your site and your content and I think a lot of people respect that.

You haven’t taken any funding whatsoever, as far as I know, but the 9rules site aren’t sporting that many ads. How do you make it work, financially?
Nope, we’ve turned a few offers down because they just didn’t feel right – either too much money, or differing goals, or just the wrong terms. We’ve been running 9rules for over a year now and we’ve been profitable every single month since the beginning. None of us work full-time on 9rules – we all have various other things like consulting, speaking, writing, etc. – so that keeps us busy on the outside. Our ads and AdSense work well because of the traffic that 9rules.com gets, so we’ve never been hurting there, but in the long-term advertising is only part of our revenue strategy. The 9rules.com site is only one part of what we’re trying to do with the 9rules brand, we have aspirations that go beyond the blog world and even beyond the Web, so we’ve been working behind closed doors on those avenues as well. What’s funny for us is while everyone is trying to figure out what 9rules is or where we’re headed, we’re already thinking 10 steps ahead just like we’ve always been doing

I get the feeling that you might be taking funding in the future?
I can’t say we won’t for sure, but we’re not actively pursuing anything at the moment. We have free dedicated servers from Media Temple (as many as we need), whatever bandwidth we need, and we do all design/tech work in-house, so we honestly have no overhead and all profit which means we’re not hurting for any kind of cash infusion.

I’m guessing you won’t tell me any of these future plans, but it sure sounds interesting. For some reason I can see the 9rules leaf on a glossy magazine, but maybe that’s just me?
That’d be cool! We’ve been working on the 9rules brand in such a way that what it stands for – quality, reputation – can transcend the Web medium and jump to other things that we’ve been working on. Who knows

I’d like to thank Mike for being such a good sport and doing this interview with me. Check out 9rules.com, the blog, and the Notes section. Also, keep a lookout for the upcoming upgrade in a browser near you!

This Interview was published on November 10, 2006 at 7:46 am • Did you like it? Subscribe!
Submit to Reddit or StumbleUpon or Digg • Del.icio.us