A Look Back: 10 Years of Blogger
Blogger will be celebrating ten years of service on August 23, 1999. Nearly ten years ago, Pyra Labs, created by one of the Twitter founders, Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. Initially, the project started as a product called ‘Pyra,’ which functioned as project manager, contact manager, and to-do list. This was later re-packaged into what we now call Blogger.
With no money to continue operation, a revenue model was put into place, with Blogger Pro being introduced. 2002 brought with it the ability to license the product to other companies. Less than three years after launch, Google acquired the service, with intentions of monetizing the service with their own ads and adding it to the portfolio. Google was closely aligned with the blogging community, and they felt that they could continue the brand into the future with the hosting/storage and the people to fuel any new innovations.
Blogger - 1999 Design
Blogger - 2000 Design
Blogger - 2005 Design
The History and a Few Notes
It is hard to believe the direction that blogging has taken since Blogger, or any blog solutions were released. Blogger, even for the most harsh critics of the service, has helped shape the way we blog, the direction of blogging, and the number of people who started blogging. The name itself, Blogger, explains the entire service and purpose of the service.
With the inception of the service, Blogging was meant to be free. However, hosting and development costs ultimately led to “pro” accounts, and subsequently, advertising. However, anything online has these problems – trying to gain new members/users while still trying to generate a solid revenue source.
The takeover by Google was certainly viewed as good for some, while it also marked what could be problems ahead, and some of them are still being faced today. Take a look at the design and set of features available with Blogger. Yes, new themes have been added, a new overall design was introduced after Google purchased the company, and “Gadgets” were introduced, but beyond this, there really aren’t many benefits to using the service over WordPress.com and competing services, which offer a similar or better experience.
I could sit here and list dozens of complains that I have about the service that are echoed by other members, but it is probably the wrong time and place to that. Outweighing the negatives, the service has remained consistent in being able to help people start their first blog and move them onto new levels, and this is what may be the most important.
A Quick Look at its Competition and Growth
It is often hard to judge just how many people visit blogs powered by each blog service without going into advanced metrics. I’ll be posing a simple comparison between them and looking at total traffic (unique visitors) to each service. Because I used Compete, U.S. traffic is more favored.
Traffic for Various Blog Services
The Blogspot.com domain alone receives 49.2 million visitors per month, up 4% this month and 47% over the previous year. The Blogger.com domain adds in an additional 30.1 million visitors, which is mainly the bloggers accessing the admin area. Even with WordPress.com and WordPress.org traffic combined, the audience would be smaller, although growth is stronger for this platform. TypePad, Tumblr, and Twitter, which are all players in the arena, see traffic between 2.4 and 19.7 million visitors each. Growth of Twitter is huge – 1,043% year-over-year.
Also interesting while looking at statistics, is that the following sites account for the most traffic (unique visitors monthly) out of all “.blogspot” blogs, although some may be hosted on their own accounts/domains, which aren’t accounted for.
- printable-coupons.blogspot.com – 1,504,712
- picasa-readme.blogspot.com – 1,130,818
- postsecret.blogspot.com – 661,414
- googleblog.blogspot.com – 533,639
- gmailblog.blogspot.com – 445,692
Seven of the twenty most popular blogs are owned and operated by Google staff (Google Blog, Gmail Blog, Picasa Readme Blog, Google Webmaster Central, etc.).
Interesting Facts
These facts were taken from the post on their birthday celebration.
- 270,000 words are written per minute. [At 100 words per post, as many people insert images into content, this works out to about 2,700 posts per minute, at 500 words per post, it's still about 500 posts per minute.]
- Several million people use the service each week to publish content to their blog.
- Two thirds of Blogger’s traffic comes from outside North America. Brazil, Turkey, Spain, Canada, and the U.K. follow the United States in traffic.
- Soccer (football for international citizens) accounts for the most popular and most frequently mentioned sport, four times larger than the number two sport, baseball.
You are urged to post how Blogger has helped you over the years and what the landmark tool means to your life.
