Blurtit is a British Q&A

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wi ...

where people asked questions and a community of regular users provided answers based on their knowledge or opinions. Blurtit was founded in 2006, and was based in

Norwich Norwich () is a cathedral city and district of Norfolk, England, of which it is the county town. Norwich is by the River Wensum, about north-east of London, north of Ipswich and east of Peterborough. As the seat of the See of Norwich, with ...

Norfolk Norfolk () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in East Anglia in England. It borders Lincolnshire to the north-west, Cambridgeshire to the west and south-west, and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the No ...

, UK.“Norfolk firm answers web profit puzzle”
Eastern Daily Press, 13 January 2010 Blurtit resembled a

social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...

site as opposed to an information reference site.Public profile
, BlurtitWebsite review
FeedMyApp, 7 August 2009Website review
Design Critique, 17 December 2009 Contributors were encouraged to enter multi–user discussions and to voice opinions about the questions placed. Questions were typically in the long tail of internet search in that they had a large number of keywords, produced limited results on a search engine, and as such required a live human to answer them. Blurtit covered a diverse range of subjects including social and spiritual matters.

History

Tim O’Shea created and launched Blurtit in 2006 as a new venture in their company, Mindcom Internet Limited. Originally it was intended as an experiment to gauge whether a social based Q & A model would be an effective internet traffic generator. Until then Mindcom's revenue was derived from arbitrage of

pay per click Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher (typically a search engine, website owner, or a network of websites) when the ad is clicked. Pay-per-click is usually ...

advertising rates and

affiliate marketing Affiliate marketing is a marketing arrangement in which affiliates receive a commission for each visit, signup or sale they generate for a merchant. This arrangement allows businesses to outsource part of the sales process. It is a form of ...

. By 2008 Blurtit became the company's main source of income. The increase in online traffic mirrored that of peers JustAnswer,

Answers.com Answers.com, formerly known as WikiAnswers, is an Internet-based knowledge exchange. The Answers.com domain name was purchased by entrepreneurs Bill Gross and Henrik Jones at idealab in 1996. The domain name was acquired by NetShepard and sub ...

, Answerbag and

Yahoo! Answers Yahoo! Answers was a community-driven question-and-answer (Q&A) website or knowledge market owned by Yahoo! where users would ask questions and answer those submitted by others, and upvote them to increase their visibility. Questions were org ...

. Blurtit's income source was generated solely by

contextual advertising Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising for advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile browsers. In context targeting, advertising media are controlled on the basis of the content of ...

that corresponded to the topics being discussed on the site itself."Blurtit benefits from Google AdSense"
New Media Knowledge 10 February 2010“AdTaily Signs Up Q&A Community Blurtit”
TechCrunch, 17 June 2010 In 2009 Blurtit started working on the development phase of Qhub, a tool for both experts and novice users with a passion for a particular subject to help them set up their own dedicated Q & A forum.“How to fail and succeed”
Eastern Daily Press, 16 August 2010 This development was part of the online movement where internet users are generating content. It is similar to other online services, such as

Squidoo Squidoo was a revenue-sharing article-writing site. Articles were called "lenses". In 2010, the site consisted of 1.5 million lenses . On August 15, 2014, founder Seth Godin announced that HubPages had acquired Squidoo. History Development st ...

(articles),

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...

(blogs) and SocialGO (social networks). All of them help people set up their own websites without the necessity of having a high level of technical knowledge. Qhub was officially launched in January 2010, but subsequently ceased operations after a brief trial run in June 2011. In September 2010, Blurtit averaged 12.5 million visitors a month and, as of May 2011, had in the region of 2 million questions. However, over the course of the next few months, the site merged, quality-controlled and retired some questions so that, as at July 2011, currently there are around 600,000 questions.Traffic analysis
QuantcastPress Room
, Blurtit Also in September 2010, the company renamed itself Blurtit Limited and exited all non Q&A operations. In November 2019, Blurtit Ltd. applied to Companies House for a voluntary strike off as the IP ownership was sold to another company.

References

{{reflist

External links

Blurtit

Qhub
Community websites Internet properties established in 2006 Online companies of the United Kingdom British companies established in 2006 Question-and-answer websites