9rules - The best content from the independent web.

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There are a lot of blog/content networks sprouting up this year, which should come as no surprise with the success of Gawker Media and Weblogs, Inc.. The problem with this uprising of networks though is that many people tend to link them all together and assume they follow the same business plan and philosophy. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Every network has their own little “catch” and I have had a lot of questions with regards to what is the “catch” with 9rules. Where do I have to put the ads? How many times do I have to write during the week? What do we have to name our first born child? I can answer the first two and I will leave the third question for you.

How Many Ads?

Let’s use Kartooner as an example of a site within the network. If you visit Kartooner you will see there are no ads on the site. Why? Well because Erik didn’t want them. He wants to chronicle his life without worrying if he is receiving a certain percentage of clickthroughs. Fair enough. There was no special deal involved between him and the Network. He simply stated he didn’t want any ads and we were cool with that.

In the future if he wishes to add a revenue stream to his site we will gladly help him out. Till then though, you can view his site ad-free and we have no problems with that.

How Much Content?

Nothing is worse than having to be forced to write when you don’t want to, especially on your own site. Sometimes you just wish to walk away and have some free time so you can come back and continue to write quality content. We understand because we go through the same phases with our sites. If you are in the network you are here because we believe in your content. We look at your writing patterns and already have an understanding of how frequenly you write. We know that two to three high-quality entries can have just as much power as — or even more — than 100 blurbs scattered throughout the month.

There is something special about writing with freedom and that’s what we love about these sites so why would we change that? Admittedly if you disappear for 2 years we might question whether you should be in the network anymore, but why would you do that if you are having fun?

Stupid Business Plan

So we don’t require sites to have ads and we don’t require them to post a certain amount of content, this is quite possibly the dumbest business plan you have ever heard of. There has to be something we are not telling you…has to be, right?.

Here are the main conditions for joining the network:

• We reserve the right to terminate your membership.
• We require 60 days written notice if you wish to leave, which is something we never want to see because then obviously we failed at our job.
• We require that you link back to the company site.

For members who wish to generate revenue from their site we have a revenue sharing plan in place (more on this in a later entry). Other than that there really is no “catch” that I can think of to confirm your suspicions that we are an evil corporation. Somewhere in between the inception of the web and now, we forgot how special great content is and why we are drawn towards it. Our goal is to bring content back to the forefront of the web at the risk of not becoming filthy rich (save that for the other guys).

If you look at the member sites before they joined the network and after they joined, the only difference you should see is that they now feature the 9rules Network logo. Why would we want to mess with a good thing? Sure it would be great if everyone wished to maximize their potential revenue from their sites, but not at the risk of lowering the quality of their site. Even though we are the 9rules Network it’s still your site, your rules.

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