Over the past few years ProBlogger and it’s creator, Darren Rowse, have been featured in a growing number of mainstream media and larger online news sites. This page is an attempt to sort and collate such reports.
Press representatives wishing to arrange interviews with Darren are welcome to approach him via the details on his contact form.
August 2014 – ABC Radio – How to Write a Blog
August 2014 – Sydney Morning Herald/The Age – Rowse turns blog into business.
January 2014 – featured in My Career Article Communicating a career move.
September 2013 – featured on Channel 9 News on the Gold Coast:
September 2013 – Australian Financial Review – Blogging bootcamp: Five ways to grow your brand.
April 2013 – Listed in Forbes as one of the Global Top 50 Social Media Influencers.
November 2012 – featured in ‘Australia Unlimited‘ (an Australian Government publication) as being one of Australia’s top Digital Influencers.
November 2012 – Breakfast on Channel TEN (National Australian program).
May 2012 – New York Times – Expatriate Bloggers Chronicle Details of Home Renovations
March 2012 – Herald Sun – Melbourne Seizes on Twitter Craze.
Featured in Melbourne’s top 10 Twitter users along with Dannii Minogue, Shane Warne and Hamish and Andy.
September 2011 – Sydney Morning Herald – RIP Blogs: Lapsed Bloggers Last Post
”A number of bloggers did give up blogging to get on to Twitter but, for me, my blog is my home base and Twitter is my outpost, where I share links and build relationships,” he says. ”My blog’s traffic has gone up since social media came about.’
Rowse says data that shows a drop in blogging services doesn’t reflect people abandoning the format – more that bloggers are now using their own domains.
‘The Australian blogging community has really grown,” he says. ”We’re having a conference in October with 300 people. Five years ago there was no conference. So, the blogosphere is really thriving here; it’s just less about personal life and more about niche bloggers, including the mummy bloggers.”
December 2010 – Morning Show – Channel 7 (video below):
October 2010 – Melbourne’s Herald Sun – Shane Warne, Sheik of Tweak, becomes King of Tweet – Darren named Australia’s most influential Twitter user.
21 June 2009 – Wall Street Journal To Blog or Not to Blog
28 May 2008 – Channel TEN News (Australia) – see video below
26 May 2008 – Chicago Tribune – Blogging paying off for a few
28 March 2008 – The Australian – Turning clicks into cash
15 January 2008 – Wall Street Journal – New Services Help Bloggers Bring in Ad Revenue
18 December 2007 – Forbes.com – The Web Celeb 25
26 October 2007 – Sydney Morning Herald – WWW spooked by Google algorithm tweak. Also the same article in The Age.
30 August 2007 – The Australian – Network expects blogging to pay off.
16 July – Business Week – profiled as one of 14 bloggers making money online
11 July – London Times Online.
15 June 2006 – The Age.
Why Bloggers Blog – an examination of why a variety of different bloggers blog – including some of my favorite Aussie bloggers.
11 May 2006 – The Age and SMH.
A blog’s life – An interview with me about blogging and the technologies that I use and value.
13 March 2006 – The Age – Online buying frenzy as big business swoops
As per SMH article below.
11 March 2006 – The Sydney Morning Herald – Online buying frenzy as big business swoops on sites (as part of a page 3 feature on Online buyouts)
“Take the case of Darren Rowse. Working from his northern suburbs Melbourne home with a single Macintosh computer, Rowse along with three colleagues – two Aussies, one Canadian, none of whom he has met – run a blog network of 85 sites, known as b5 media.
Designed in Toronto using open sourced software, hosted out of the US for a quarter of the Australian price, the site went live in September last year and is already generating about a million page impressions a day.
Rowse and his partners are now looking to get more serious about the advertising side. The quietly spoken Rowse is an unlikely media magnate but with the Weblogs, Inc network being snapped up by AOL for a reported $33 million late last year, blogs are definitely on the radar of the big US media companies.
Rowse started blogging in late 2002 as a way of communicating with fellow believers from his experimental Baptist church using the web address livingroom.org.au. He has a digital camera blog and his problogger.net site is ranked among the top 100 blogs.
Through his site he started communicating with Duncan Riley, a resident of Bunbury, a couple of hours south of Perth. Riley has just sold his blog, The Blog Herald, for a substantial sum. The Blog Herald is considered by some to be the bible of the business of blogging and has been Riley’s passion for three years till he sold it for a rumoured $US75,000 ($100,000) just before Christmas.
Riley and Rowse then joined forces with an Adelaide blogger Shai Coggins. The blogging world is big into lists and late last year she was cited as one of the 10 “Most Powerful Women in Blogging”. Coggins merged her all-female network of 20 bloggers with b5’s group to form one of the largest blog networks on the internet.
The president of b5 media is Canadian, Jeremy Wright. A self-confessed “blogpreneur” Wright warns that doing a blog network is “a crazy amount of work” especially as he has to be awake when the “Aussies” are asleep.
“More than I imagined, and more than any of the founders of b5 imagined. Even with all of us working our butts off, there is still too much to do,” he said.”
9 November 2005 – Today Show
Featured in an interview on the Today show on Blogging. Read my recap on the interview here.
22 August 2005 – The Age – Rowse Ad-ministers a one-man media empire:
‘DARREN ROWSE works harder at blogging than in any job he’s ever had, but the author of several blogs, including an authoritative digital camera site and one on how to blog, says he earns more from his former hobby than in his previous job….
Running a one-man media empire has been made simpler by technology. Traffic monitoring software helps convince advertisers that he can deliver readers. He makes money from Amazon partnerships, a sponsorship deal with Kodak for his camera site and from privately arranged ads, but his income comes overwhelmingly from the Google AdSense program, which pays him each time someone clicks through an ad on his site….’
17 July 2005 – Slashdot – Rise of the Professional Blogger:
‘”Robert Scoble today points to a blogger who is claiming he earns between $10,000 and $20,000 per month via Google Adsense.” From the article: “The cheque was the biggest cheque I’ve ever held onto (well the biggest I’ve held onto that has my name on it). The amazing thing is that in the month of May I earned more than I earned in a whole year in 2003 from a ‘real job’ (of course at the time I was only working a 3 day week while I studied part time) and well over half as much as I earned from Adsense in the whole of 2004.”‘
15 July 2005 – The Age (and Sydney Morning Herald) – Living High on the Blog:
‘When Melburnian Darren Rowse began his first experiment in blogging a little over two-and-a-half years ago, he was part of a group starting a new church and merely wanted to keep a record of what was being done.
Today, he earns a nice round figure from his many blogs, enough to make it a full-time occupation that’s catapulted him into the highest tax bracket.
He advises companies that want to explore how blogging can enhance their products or services, speaks about blogging whenever he can and is part of an emerging Melbourne business network designed to support and resource micro-businesses in the inner-northern suburbs….’
12 July 2005 – The Australian – Blogging for Fun and Profit
‘There is a widespread perception blogging has become more prominent and influential in North America than in Australia.
“I don’t think it’s anywhere near as mainstream as in the US or Canada,” says Darren Rowse, of Melbourne, who runs a number of blogs, including www.problogger.net and www.digitalphotographyblog.com.
“We’re early adopters of many tech-nologies, but blogging seems to have slipped under the radar.”
Part of that may be because blogging is a phenomenon transcending national borders, Rowse says, although concern may be fed by the frequently self-analytical nature of much blogging….’