Bloggy Network (the resultant of a merger) is now roughly 15 months old. It does roughly 4.5 million pageviews a month now, and should crack 5 million pageviews next month (growth is in fact accelerating, not tapering off). All organic without a dime of investment money.

My next few posts are going to be about Bloggy Network and the (many) challenges we have faced. My first post (this one) is going to be about our history, and how we started.

Enthropia Inc has been around for a while (registered corporation for over four years now). As a web-dev company, we pretty much only develop projects for in-house usage. Occasionally we decide we no longer want to be part of a certain market, and jettison our investments (ie sites) in that niche.

I first came across Jacob Gower February 26, 2004, when we were selling one of our sites. He was quite happy with his purchase, flipping it for a very handsome profit a couple of months later.

We kept in touch, with Jacob buying most of the sites we sold (including one of the few sites I regret selling – Webmaster.org). I remember him telling me about having to sell Webmaster.org as he was committing himself to blogs. As we kept on conversing, he kept telling me how fantastic blogs were. Around this time we were still involved with Evo-Dev, and we decided on a joint venture: Blog Top Sites. We had a lot of experience in running topsites, and Jacob was involved in the blogosphere. The site was an instant success, signing up hundreds and hundreds of blogs in the first week. Today the site tracks over 4.5 million pageviews a day across over 40,000 blogs. The site generates over 30,000 pageviews a day now.

As things changed and aligned themselves in the right direction, we ended up purchasing EatonWeb, the oldest blog directory out there (side fact: Brigette Eaton was one of the first people ever fired for blogging, somewhere in 1999 I believe).

The site was popular, but it was horribly coded (PHP3 in fact). I also took a look on the blogosphere – it was extremely fragmented. We did what we do best – launch a new site, accumulating many of these fragmented services into one place. Only this time it wasn’t from scratch – we had Eatonweb to help push it forward Our original launch was nothing more than a blog directory, button maker, and pagerank checker.

Success was at hand. By eschewing the traditional hierarchal structure in web-directories and choosing an open multi-category/tag format, we were doing directories ‘different’. People liked having multiple services under one roof, and we expanded our offerings.

By now Jacob had designed his network ‘Bloggy Network’ (a name suggested by me). He had a few good blogs under his belt, including Forever Geek and Blogging Pro. We had 50% of the largest blog topsite (which spawned dozens of duplicates) and we had the best blog services site.

Enthropia has roughly 6 divisions. Each has its own manager. So when thinking about our future plan into blogs, there was only one logical person: Mr. Jacob.

And the pieces just fit.

Next up: Blog Flux, and why it clicks.