Copyblogger is an old, well-established blog on marketing and blogging. I remember, long ago, it had a lot of interesting and helpful articles. I read every post for years, and often saw others talk about it.
Until a couple of years ago. At some point, it turned to repetitious and uninteresting rehashes that make no improvement on the eerily familiar articles already published on the same subjects. Maybe they just got bored with it, and that’s why they started Copyblogger Media:
Having all these great people in one company allows us to do even bigger and better things. This means better products, prices, and support. It also means more and better free content, unique live events, and even new platforms.
The articles Copyblogger posts these days are rehashed advice, nonsense, and advertisements for products in other parts of the company. It’s dull.
So what about the premise of this article? Is Copyblogger Media a den of scams?
I don’t think so, at least based on the information available to me. Brian Clark, lead whatever at the company is less than nice at times, but that’s hardly a mark against the company. But the products they offer don’t seem to have much value. Their themes are drab, their theme framework provides questionable value, and their plugins don’t offer much functionality.
The tools do things that don’t take much time or effort, so how could they save enough time to call for such high prices? Maybe that landing page plugin could do something worthwhile, but it would be a gem in a pile of polished shells. And the devoted brand acolytes probably don’t know any better when they write their glowing testimonials.
While it doesn’t fit any reasonable definition of scam, I do think Copyblogger and the people behind it gave up on blogging and tried something else, and don’t know enough about the services and products they offer to know how little value they offer for the prices they charge.
Why do I single out Copyblogger when the Internet is full of worse? Something about Copyblogger irks me in a way I can’t quite identify. I can’t tell whether it’s a well-meaning company gone wrong or slime wearing a nice face.
Plus, this guy seems to think there’s something more going on. I don’t know how much weight to apply to the words of an android/lawyer/Internet vigilante. His words and my thoughts are the only negative things I can find about Copyblogger Media.
And that’s the problem. The dearth of reviews is bizarre.
I’ve got more bad reviews than Copyblogger Media, and I don’t have anywhere near its profile. It makes me think they’re hiding something, and trying to bury negative press. The two bad takes I’ve found are people with a talent for riling up Internet mobs, so they have some protection.
Someone else must have said something. Where are they?
Thanks for posting this. I’ve just stumbled across your post whilst doing a little investigation of myself about the exact same question – why no criticism?
I, too, read Copyblogger religiously at one point – also noticing the decline in the quality of the articles at around the same time. I even offered them a guest post last month, which was more dismissed than declined. So I decided to blog about it (here, if you’ll excuse the link – http://alldaycreative.co.uk/blog/everything-you-read-on-copyblogger-is-shit/ ).
Brian left a derisory comment on my blog within 15 minutes of it going live – about 9pm on a Sunday evening New York time.
That doesn’t tie in with the theory that the original team take a hands-off approach. If I were a famous blogger with a supposed six figure income I wouldn’t be wasting time on second division bloggers – I certainly wouldn’t be flaming them on a Sunday night. So clearly the team is still very much active and micro-managing.
So why no criticism elsewhere? I think most people are scared of going up against a PR7 site for fear of shenanigans – plenty more people were willing to congratulate me privately than publicly, put it that way. I found that fact alone somewhat chilling, hence the digging. But it’s probably just the case no-one else with a PR6 or 7 blog is willing to call them out – so bad reviews like mine get buried.
Apart from Salty Droid’s screenshots, there’s no evidence of foul play whatsoever. However, there’s definitely something off in the way the company handles criticism – I’m still amazed at being flamed within 15 minutes.
Evidently Brian does still care very much about his site. But apparently not enough to save it from itself… sad. It used to be a real nice place.
I’ve started to think of Copyblogger as something like a textbook publisher. They’ve run out of ideas for how to improve the product, so now they rehash, attack critics (directly and otherwise), and generally seek rent.
Thanks for taking the time to comment. I think there’s enough heat on the IM world for them to be more careful, so maybe more people will come out of hiding.