A B2B newsbrand that was previously fairly unknown outside its niche has become one of the most cited news sources worldwide on AI answer engines.
Charles Read, co-founder of Blooloop which covers the visitor attractions industry, told Press Gazette how embracing the LLMs has paid dividends for his business and revealed how the site has grown from being one man and his laptop to employing an 11-strong team.
Read launched Blooloop 21 years ago after starting his career selling B2B magazine advertising in something of a “boiler room” environment in London in the 1990s: “To be frank, we were never 100% sure the magazines were actually published and distributed, but we were selling it. So I got to be really good.”
After moving to Devon with his wife, Read decided to launch his own online B2B publication and settled on visitor attractions as a vertical that did not seem to be well served by specialist websites at the time. Five years later wife Rachel quit her accountancy job and joined the business full time.
Today Blooloop has 11 full-time staff (four in editorial) and reaches a global monthly audience of up to 300,000 visitors per month. The daily email newsletter goes out to 22,000 people.
Its readers are the people who manage, operate and own visitor attractions from theme parks like Alton Towers to The Getty art gallery in Los Angeles. Advertisers are the many businesses providing services to the attractions industry, from businesses that build and service rollercoasters to companies like Panasonic that supply projectors.
The staff all work remotely, mostly in the UK, but 45% of the audience is based in the US (with the UK the next biggest audience area followed by Europe).
The name Blooloop was chosen because “with anything that means anything, the dotcom domain was already bought. So we just put random words together and we thought this worked because the O’s were like a rollercoaster”, Read said.
Revenue and turnover have doubled since 2020
The business has made a profit every year since it started and has doubled both turnover and profit since 2020. Some of the employees are also shareholders and most have been with the business for over seven years.
Blooloop runs its own online awards, which make money from entries and sponsorship. Its main revenue stream is via subscriptions from vendors to the attractions industry who pay for native content placements and on-site advertising. These subscriptions range in price from £6,000 per year to around £50,000 and renewal rates are said to run at 70 to 80% per year.
Blooloop also runs a series of sponsored influencer rankings called the Blooloop 50 which are widely referenced on Linkedin.
There is no paywall and Read embraces scraping by the main LLMs (whilst blocking other unwanted scrapers from accessing the site).
This strategy helped result in an impressive showing for Blooloop when PR services directory Muckrack published research earlier this year on the journalists and newsbrands which are most likely to be cited in AI answers on the four leading answer engines.
Blooloop news editor Bea Mitchell was the fourth most-cited journalist globally on AI answer engines, according to the research which was strong on specialist voices. Blooloop was reckoned to be the ninth most-cited newsbrand in the UK overall in AI answers.
‘We are in the embracing AI camp’
Asked about his approach to LLMs, Read said: “It kind of reminds me in a way of when the pandemic started. Some of our competitors, they immediately sacked people and stopped publishing. And we did the opposite. We had a month where our revenue went down and we thought, we’re going to double down. We’re going to do our best.
“So we kept writing mostly about Covid and we went with it. And I think that really helped us.”
He noted that at a recent Press Gazette conference it appeared publishers were divided between those embracing AI and those who are trying to keep it away.
“And we’re very much in the embracing AI camp. We’ve always done everything we can with our website, working with Google to make sure it works in the exact right way to be found by the search engines and the AI search engines.
“And I think we just view it very much as a tool rather than a threat.
“I think we’re the best at what we do in our admittedly small niche, but I know that AI sees us as a source of truth.”
Read said people who come to Blooloop from ChatGPT “spend longer on the site on average than other people. And I’m sure that’s because they’ve found us on ChatGPT and they’ve got an answer to something and then they’ve thought, oh, well, I’ll drill down a bit more.”
Because of that, he continued, “even if our traffic goes down slightly at some stage, if we’re getting more meaningful traffic because of AI, I don’t mind that, to be honest.
“They’re looking for sources where they can go to and recommend confidently as being this is what’s happening in this particular business. We haven’t done any tricks or savvy moves. It’s just that Bea, for example, has been writing great content every day for seven years.”
And is Blooloop’s high visibility on LLMs delivering any business benefits?
“We’re getting more and more and people asking about visibility on search engines to our sales team when they’re speaking to them. In fact, for almost everyone in China, that’s the first question, how will this help us get seen on the AI search engines?”
Blooloop is also deploying AI in-house with the launch of its own chatbot powered by Google Gemini and the creation of eight localised versions of the site translated into different languages.
The next frontier for Blooloop is China, where it already has advertisers, and it has employed a London-based Chinese-speaking freelance to cover the country.
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