Since we’ve launched Blogbar in November 2005, we’ve had some major work done : 3 major versions of the tool made by Eric, 8 languages dealt with, more than 25 search tools in the latest release, the ability to search your own blog, a rather successful “Blogbar Design Contest“, blogbars installed as far as Japan, Chile, Italy…

We’re now talking of more than 750 installed Blogbars, more than 1.8 million Blogbar displays in July > that is, more than 60k displays per day, and growing

Blogbar financing

As of this date, Blogbar has been privately funded. That is, mainly time spent by Eric & myself, plus some expenses (hosting, domain name…). This way of funding the project slows us down, since we both have “real” jobs beside Blogbar to earn money to raise our children ! Money, for everybody ?

With the latest 3.2 release (which we’ve released earlier this morning), everybody is allowed to make money with Blogbar : you, the users, and us, to help us further develop this free service.

For Blogbar users

As of today, you can now insert your own Adsense code when you are in the process of installing the Blogbar. Once you’ve put your Adsense code, then you’ve inserted your “new” Blogbar on your website / blog, Blogbar will automatically pass on your Adsense code to Google when a user makes a search from your blog/website. That means any sponsored link clicked by an user on a results page coming from your blog will be credited to YOUR account! Just insert your Adsense code right now, or subscribe to one if you don’t have an Adsense account.

For us

We plan on inserting a sponsored txt-link to replace the small “blogbar service” sentence at the bottom of the Blogbar (as shown here on the right). That is, if we manage to find some advertisers willing to purchase this spot (then drop us a note here). Note there shouldn’t be any change in the Blogbar shape or layout beside this link insertion if we sell it !

Blogbar Evolutions

This small link may help finance the coming evolutions we have in mind for Blogbar :

• add new search tools if/when they’re available : search tools, social bookmark tools, specialized tools such as YouTube, DailyMotion…
• centralize all results on one page (a bit like Jux2 SERP maybe)
• develop further widgets (as the ones we’ve done for Netvibes () and Typepad)
• save your searches / share your searches
• visualize a tagcloud of users’ searches
• …and many more