Today (August 4, 2005), Blogcritics.org had their 10 millionith uniue visitor, after being in business for almost three years. It's ranked as the 15th most popular blog on the Internet. It's special in that they have over 1058 bloggers who copy articles from their own blog paste them onto the Blogcritics.org site. They get around 60 new articles each day and, without having to register, anyone can leave comments to begin sometimes, fascinating threads with the authors and other readers and writers.

I kept on stumbling across the site as I searched for music and film reviews. One day, I pasted my own review of Collateral that I posted on Winnipegmovies.com. The author teased me for writing a better review than his and suggested that I submit it as its own entry. Soon after, I signed up at Blogger.com to get my own blog going, I posted the Collateral review to Blogcritics and I signed up to be an official Blogcriitcs writer.

One of the benefits of becoming a Blogcritics writer is that you can get on their mailing list to receive e-mails with announcements of new books, CDs, DVDs, etc., up for grabs, usually first come, first served. Most of my postings are new films that I pay out of pocket to see. Recently, I scoured their database of review material and received permission to review 18 CDs and DVDs that no one wanted...a lot of it well known jazz artists who I happen to like. I've probably been approved to receive about $500 worth of items in the last year, and that's without really trying. Of course, I'm going to make the time to review everying. That's the trade off.

So, how do they make money? Every single post needs to have a link back to Amazon.com. Whenever someone clicks on one of these links and buys anything, Blogcritics makes a small commission. The links to Amazon.com are essentially ISBN numbers. By entering this information into the Moveable Type data entry screen, it creates a graphic of the cover of the book, CD, DVD, etc., that you are reviewing.

Blogcritics has become so successful that they are an official news source for Google and Yahoo!. At Google.com, select the News link and you're taken to a rich website. Quite often, Blogcritics ends up being among the top hits here, and serveral times, I have noticed them end up as number one. That's a lot of exposure for your average blogger. I just did a search for "Wedding Crashers." I was not at all surprised to find that my review, which was posted on Blogcritics today, is the number three raked hit. My review for the recent Beulah DVD was the sixth ranked search for the word "Beulah" and the number one hit for "Beulah A Good Band Is Easy To Kill." About 15 minutes after posting my review for the film "Must Love Dogs," a Google News search for it ranked my Blogcritics review as # 1.