Editor’s note: This article was originally published in August 2009. The archived original can be found here.
In August 2009, Splashpress Media acquired 9rules for an undisclosed amount. If you weren’t paying attention, you missed it entirely. That was the point.
9rules represented something specific in the mid-2000s blogging landscape. Founded in summer 2005 by Paul Scrivens and Mike Rundle, it operated as what they called a content network rather than a simple blog aggregator. The model was selective by design. Members were hand-picked out of thousands that apply to join, their blogs evaluated over an extended period of time with regard to quality. In 2006, the network won Best Community Site of the Year at SXSWi in Austin, Texas.
The selection process reveals what made 9rules different. Applications were handled in submission rounds, occurring roughly twice a year with a 24-hour window to submit. The fifth membership round attracted 1,190 new submissions. They accepted approximately 24. That’s a 2% acceptance rate for a blog network, at a time when most networks were trying to grow as fast as possible.
By 2007, according to Rochester Institute of Technology, the network had grown to more than 300 members writing on more than 30 topics, with the 9rules home page serving as gateway to about 3 million pages of content a month. Co-founder Mike Rundle noted the network was profitable and supporting the founders full-time through 9rules revenue.
What selective meant
The network’s philosophy came from nine rules that gave it its name. Love what you do. Never stop learning. Form works with function, not against it. Simple can be beautiful. Work hard, play hard. You get what you pay for. When others talk, listen. Always improve. Respect your inspiration.
These weren’t just aspirational statements. They shaped how the network operated. When Darren Rowse examined 9rules in 2005, he observed that the 9Rules Network becomes more powerful in their influence as each new blog is added to the network, and if they played their cards right and worked for the good of their bloggers, the flow-on impact as bloggers returned favors could be massive.
The value proposition was membership itself. Being accepted into 9rules meant your blog had been evaluated and found worthy by human editors who cared about sustained quality. It meant association with other publishers who met the same standards. It meant exposure to audiences who came to 9rules specifically to find good writing.
This was curation in its original sense. Not algorithmic filtering based on engagement metrics, but editorial judgment about what constituted good work.
The transaction nobody noticed
When the acquisition happened in August 2009, it should have been significant news in the blogging community. Splashpress Media was a legitimate player, owning over 30 websites including The Blog Herald and Performancing. They understood digital publishing. The founders of 9rules were well-known figures. The network itself had won awards and built a reputation.
The three people who sold 9rules were known within the blogging community as The Triad: Paul Scrivens, Mike Rundle, and Tyme White (also known as Tyme Weber). Scrivens was 9rules’ public voice; Rundle handled technical architecture; White ran the application process and member relations — the person most members encountered day-to-day.
When SplashPress took over, Jayvee Fernandez, a blogger and editor within the organization, became the new community liaison. One of his first moves was launching a member interview series on the 9rules blog — members interviewing members — a format that reflected 9rules’ original ethos of peer recognition over top-down editorial authority. It was a deliberate attempt to signal that what SplashPress had acquired wasn’t just a blog directory, but a community built around genuine connection.
The silence tells you where attention had moved.
By 2009, something fundamental was shifting in how people consumed and created content online. According to Google Trends data, blog popularity peaked around 2009 and began declining almost immediately after. The decline in searches for blog correlated with increases in searches for social media.
By May 2010, a Pew Research report found that more than half of Americans now used a social network. Facebook passed 500 million active users by July 2010. The Social Network film premiered in October, cementing Facebook’s cultural dominance. The infrastructure of attention had changed.
What was being left behind
The timing of the 9rules acquisition matters because it coincided with a broader transformation in digital media. Pew Research’s State of the News Media 2010 documented the scale of what was happening. Newspapers, including online, saw ad revenue fall 26% during the year, which brought the total loss over the last three years to 43%. The report estimated that the newspaper industry had lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000, or roughly 30%.
Traditional editorial infrastructure was collapsing at the same moment social platforms were exploding. The State of the Blogosphere 2010 noted the transformation. What might have started as a form of self-expression had officially graduated into fully fledged self-actualization, with 30% of corporate bloggers admitting to blogging as a way to get published or featured in traditional media, and 57% of self-employed bloggers sharing their expertise and thought-leadership as a way of attracting new clients.
Blogging was professionalizing. Personal expression was giving way to content marketing. Community-building was being replaced by audience-building. The model that 9rules represented: careful selection, editorial standards, community over scale, didn’t fit where things were heading.
From curation to algorithm
What replaced networks like 9rules was fundamentally different. Instead of editors selecting blogs for quality, algorithms began determining what got distribution based on engagement. Instead of membership in a curated community, creators competed for algorithmic favor through optimization and tactics designed to trigger platform distribution mechanisms.
The criteria changed. Not is this good writing that sustains quality over time but will this generate clicks, shares, comments, and time on platform. The gatekeepers shifted from human editors who could apply subjective judgment to automated systems that measured objective signals.
This change had consequences that extended beyond 9rules or any individual network. When curation meant human judgment, there was friction in the system. Editors could say no. Standards could be maintained. Quality had to be demonstrated over time, not just in a single viral moment.
When curation became algorithmic, that friction disappeared. Everything could be published. Nothing was too much. Distribution became a function of engagement rather than editorial evaluation. The question stopped being should this exist and became will this spread.
What we traded
The shift from curated networks to algorithmic platforms involved trade-offs we’re still processing in 2026. We gained unprecedented access. Anyone could publish without gatekeepers. Distribution mechanisms could make unknown creators visible overnight. Barriers to entry collapsed.
But we lost something in the exchange. We lost spaces where editorial judgment determined value. We lost communities built around shared standards rather than shared engagement patterns. We lost the understanding that selection isn’t censorship, that curation can serve community rather than suppress it.
The transformation was documented in research on blogging’s evolution. Users began migrating to social media, causing a decline in the traditional personal blog. Over time, more blogs were run by businesses and professional marketers creating content for a specific audience.
The professionalization happened alongside the shift from editorial to algorithmic distribution. Blogs became content marketing. Personal expression became brand building. Communities became audiences. The infrastructure changed, and with it, the entire logic of what blogs were for.
The meaning of silence
When the 9rules acquisition happened without making waves, it wasn’t because the network didn’t matter. It was because we were already looking elsewhere. The attention had moved to platforms that promised something different: scale without gatekeepers, distribution without editors, reach without the friction of human judgment.
The silence around the acquisition was its own signal. It told you what was being left behind as we rushed toward what came next. Selective communities. Editorial standards. The belief that quality could be identified through judgment rather than measured through metrics.
9rules represented an approach that couldn’t scale the way venture capital demanded. It couldn’t compete with the frictionless distribution of social platforms. It couldn’t match the growth curves that defined success in the new era. The model was built for a moment that was ending just as it reached maturity.
Looking back from 2026, the acquisition marks a transition point. Not the cause of the shift from curated networks to algorithmic platforms, but a symptom of it. By 2009, the infrastructure for a different kind of digital culture was already being built. The fact that almost nobody noticed when 9rules was sold tells you how complete the transition already was.
The lesson isn’t nostalgia for 2006 or critique of algorithms. It’s recognition that when we choose scale over selection, we make trade-offs. We gain efficiency and access. We lose friction and judgment. Both matter. The silence around 9rules reminds us what gets lost when attention moves too quickly to register what’s being left behind.
