Saturday, November 23, 2013

Bubblews: an uglier, but incentivized mashup of Reddit & Tumblr?

Just signed up for Bubblews to test it out. Now, before you say, Ana: yet another social network, really? Well, I like testing obscure and new social networks, like it's my job! (Well, it kind of is.)


Here's what I did before deciding to register: I searched for "Bubblews vs ..." and got two suggestions on Google: Squidoo and Hubpages. Then I clicked on the first result, which was this page: "Bubblews vs Squidoo". (Note to Bubblews, your brand name sucks because Google kept trying to substitute it with the word "bubbles"!). Reading that article peaked my interest and I decided to register and test it out.

Here are my first impressions of Bubblews:
  • Based on my experiences on Reddit, it allows similar vote up/vote down buttons for posts. It has 15 categories (kind of like subreddits), including: personal, art, tutorial, ideology etc. 
  • Like Tumblr, you can post images, text or both.
  • The interface looks a bit dated, like 2008 dated. They need to go for a more modern look if they're trying to attract a mass amount of new users (Although Reddit's interface is pretty hard on the eyes too).
  • Unlike Tubmlr or Reddit, it says you can earn $ in your account based on the number of likes and comments your posts get. Will this incentive result in the submission of better content by users? Time will tell. Also, posts must be a minimum of 400 words long in order to qualify for payment.
  • I'm guessing original content will get you more $ than curated content, but this is to be determined as I haven't posted anything yet.
  • Bubblews only has 107K registered users, which can be determined by performing the Google search for "http://www.bubblews.com/account/". Interestingly, however, in May of this year Bubblews had only 31K users, so it has seen some growth. I haven't yet determined their geographic distribution or other demographics.
Next steps: I'll post some stuff and see what happens! (Updates to follow).

****UPDATE: I will however be monitoring the number of Google Search results of the search terms "Bubblews scam" to see if the number of results for this search grows in proportion to the number of users or faster, which could indicate that it is moving in that direction. At the time of this writing there are 43.5K results for this search term.

Have any of you tried Bubblews, Squidoo, Tumblr or Reddit? If so, please comment on your experiences and/or what you like or don't like about these sites.

1 comment:

  1. So far I haven't been paid for my 1st redemption and is now on my 2nd redemption; hope they pay me this time once I hit the redeem button. However I feel that bubblews is a ponzi scheme they pay selectively.

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