Never underestimate the power of first-mover advantage, especially when being one of the first movers gets you bought by Google. Back in August, 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger. LiveJournal had launched six months before and Open Diary in October of the previous year. But it was Pyra Labs which was acquired by Google in February, 2003, and the rest was history. Now, nearly ten years later, Blogger is still the dominant hosted blogging platform. In May, 52 million individual people from the U.S. visited a Blogger blog, almost twice as many as the 28 million who visited a blog hosted by Wordpress.com (comScore). Six Apart properties, including Typepad.com, attracted 14 million.
Millions of bloggers still use Blogger because it is easy. However, Wordpress.com is making steady gains and growing its aggregate audience in the U.S. at more than twice the annual rate of Blogger (40 percent versus 14 percent). These numbers don’t count all the blogs that host Wordpress on their own servers, such as Techcrunch.
The vast majority of Blogger traffic comes from outside the United States, where its annual growth rate is 38 percent compared to Wordpress.com’s 59 percent. On a worldwide basis, Blogger blogs have a readership of 267 million people a month, compared to 143 million a month for Wordpress (comScore, April, 2008). The biggest countries are, in order:
1. U.S.
2. Brazil
3. Turkey
4. Spain
5. Canada
6. U.K.
From a business standpoint, Blogger is good for Google because it creates millions of sites which can show AdSesne ads. It creates more inventory for Google. Only recently has Google bothered to start showing ads to the users of Blogger itself every time they publish a post.
Can Blogger keep its lead indefinitely, or will Wordpress eventually catch up? Or will something else entirely overtake both of them?
Today, two of the people behind the original Blogger, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have another little service that is capturing people’s attention. It is called Twitter, you may have heard about it. In May, Twitter.com had 17.6 million unique U.S. visitors to its Website alone, making it bigger already than Six Apart.
any clue the price range google bought them for
Twitter effect shown. Notice the correlation on the chart: the inflection point of steep Twitter growth in Feb ‘09 also matches exactly an inflection in growth for Blogger and WP in Feb ‘09. that’s the discovery effect of Twittering blog links. Also that caused alot of Twitterers to start blogs.
That said, Twitter does no belong on this chart. Twitter is not a blog site(micro-blogging? not) . Its group messaging.
Can anyone let me know how do I handle this situation:
My gmail account got hacked, and by the ‘Activity Log’ feature of Google, I could figure out the IP address from where my email account was logged in.
The IP was 204.15.23.171
I do not know how to figure out which browser is this. Is there any software that can figure out whose machine is this where my account was opened and emails were tampered?
http://www31.wo...i=204.15.23.171
Wrong place to ask this, why don’t you try a forum or stackoverflow.com (not sure if, that’s the right place, but you may get some answers).
That’s a Facebook IP, so it’s probably the feature that lets Facebook log in to your Gmail and find friends in your contact list. That’s not the responsible IP address.
These days people dont have time to read more than 140 characters. At least if blogs are from tom, dick and harry, if not from arrington.
From Scripting News Archive: [http://archive.scripting.com/2005/01/10#When:5:40:49AM]
“There is some data in that report on the size of the Blogger deal. Jason Shellen, a Pyra employee at the time of the aquisition, registered to sell 3563 shares, which is worth approx $691K at the current price of $194 per share. John Borthwick, a Pyra shareholder, registered 490 shares. Paul Bausch, a Pyra founder, declared 281 shares. Of course these people could, and likely do have more Google stock. No mention of O’Reilly Associates or Evan Williams, probably the two largest Pyra shareholders, so they must be holding their holdings.
Also, at the time of the big blowup at Pyra, no one outside the founders knew what happened, financially. It’s good to see that the other founders, Meg and Paul, appear to have been taken care of.”
WordPress will catch and MOVE on. Blogger software is relatively less customizable and besides WP is open-source! So many plug-ins and so many options to choose from!
Honestly, not very many care.
Do you assume everyone is like you? Because the average idiot.. guys like me don’t like wordpress because it is not nearly as easy as blogger to get set up with a true URL. None of the blog interfaces are very easy in terms of attaching a true URL and add multiple widgets. I love posterous but the blog itself is really limited. I hate the narrow look. I want a blog that will take advantage of the of the wide screen. Sure wordpress has the most power.. it is just it also requires a lot more knowledge.. now the biggest weakness of blogger is the commenting system… It needs to have a default TC style with the websites and twitter.. why should people have to have a google gmail account..
That is the thing I hate most about google is they do not let you decouple your sign in for different products.. It is such a pain because to organize myself I used different sign in names.. I don’t want to use my gmail for youtube.. or blogger.
I use blogger because of getting paid by Adsense. If Wordpress had adsense I would use it.
Every time I keep saying I’m gonna update my personal blog, I post about 5 days in a row and then don’t touch it for a while.
I think Blogger will be redefined soon
i think so too, and it’s gonna be called Wave
It would be interesting to see the same chart, but include blogs that host Wordpress on their own servers. It seems like Wordpress would be much closer or possibly even #1.
Hey Erick — also keep in mind that comScore doesn’t count any of the mapped domain blogs running on the hosted WordPress.com – such as my blog http://raanan.com which is mapped on top of http://raanan.wordpress.com.
We do run Quantcast analytics on WordPress.com which includes these mapped domain blogs, and that shows around 60 million unique monthly people per month in the US and close to 200 million worldwide: http://www.quan...p-18-mFEk4J448M
Eric or anyone else, why do you think google went after blogger rather than livejournal?
Love to hear the responses.
cheaper to get is my guess and then maybe the fact they used perl.
The labels are just brands and the products are all generic. You can blog on a wiki or a website. You can create communities around ( big word that – around gotta have a focus) any website/forum/blog/topic
What IS gonna count is the community links and the spread of micro communities.
The web is just another dimension after all….
Zip/url/ipn….postcode?
I use blogger because, I have access to the CSS, html, javascript and ads. Wordpress.com is great for my affiliate links, but no ads period. I would love the abilities of wordpress and the monetizing ability of blogger.
The most telling point is that when I had a hosting account I used joomla and wordpress. If I could I never would host blogger on my own host. I too hope blogger is refined in the near future.
The main thing Wordpress has over Blogger is support. GoOgle is often blind to requests for support, while Wordpress responds quite quickly and in person.
Aside from that, though, in Blogger, one may rewrite the entire template from scratch: total control. In Wordpress, this granularity comes only via hosted blog: CSS on the free blog requires $15/year, and a pointed domain CNAME requires payment, too.
I use both. I still consider Wordpress a “graduation” from Blogger. I think Wordpress will grow.
Blogs are dead. Who wants to read a 500 words post that can be summarized in 140 characters? hell, who wants to WRITE a 500 words post when he can just tweet?
Well, blogs are not dead, yet, but many smaller blogs who cannot post 10+ times a day will vanish.
And Techcrunch is far from the deadpool – I did a piece comparing the early days Techcrunch to the current Techcrunch about a week ago, and their RSS count was 2.3M:
http://solarove...ays-techcrunch/
Amazingly, they are now at over 3.2M RSS subscribers!! And they think RSS is dead!!
“Can Blogger keep its lead indefinitely, or will Wordpress eventually catch up?”
You answered your own question in your post. If WordPress.com is growing at more than twice the rate that Blogger is in the US, and has a 20% growth advantage over Blogger internationally, it’s only a matter of time before Blogger is overtaken.
Also, Blogger might have a slight advantage when it comes to hosted blogs, when it comes to self-hosted blogs, Wordpress has the clear advantage. The last version of their blog platform garnered more than 3 million downloads. If you count those numbers, WordPress actually has a huge advantage over Blogger.
Missing: The fact that more and more businesses are embracing WP not just as a blog platform but as a site with robust CMS and endless plugin options…
Read…
http://nicasiod...-our-specialty/
Felix Figuereo – Managing Director
Nicasio Web Design & Development
If u just change your domain name from blogspot to dot com. That will change everything. Some people take it as a shame to host there blog in wordpress with .com domain. and they think that blogger is for kids.
But its not the case. If blogger is simple it doesn’t mean that it is only build for beginners. But i also find it very easy to use for posting and monetizing ads and tweaking my template.
A blogger user has far more knowledge of css and html than an experienced wordpress user. coz on wordpress u only add widgets by uploading the css and everything to your server and tada !!! u r done so quickly. That gives wordpress far more flexibility but the user never learns what the science …
I guess wordpress is going to lead blogger for some reasons of SEO… that’s the big issue with blogger blogs that they just don’t get indexed as they are millions of them.. Still blogger is a google company and we love it !!!
“take it as a shame to host there blog in{ wordpress } with”
sorry that is actually shame to host there blog at blogger !!!
I’ve had a blogger account forever it seems. I keep it alive by posting on it like once every month but prefer to blog on my own domain/own site instead.
Blogger is the platform I use for my site, I would like to see it redefined and become more open source like Wordpress. I was hoping for more integration through Google Friend Connect but maybe Wave will refresh and provide innovation!
I totally abandoned all of my Blogger blogs, now I only blog on my own domain
Just FYI, you have a typo in the third paragraph, form the end (AdSense): [...]can show AdSesne ads[...].
I don’t really see Twitter as competition for Blogger, since I publicize my longer blog posts via Twitter. The two services work nicely in tandem.
Blogger is still the easiest blog software to use…bar none. Sorry Wordpress.
Blogger is an awesome platform to get blogging quick. But here is my biggest problem with it. Spammers. Way back in January of 2006 when Web 2.0 was taking off I made a modest list which made it to the front page of digg. I still get lots of Google love on that page. But I have abandoned the blog for quiet some time now but left the posts up. Spammers took over. Every other day I get few email notifications that someone has commented on the post and it turns out to be spam. There is no easy way to delete it (not that I know of).
What I would have liked? I would have just liked to forward those emails to a address like killspam@blogger.com and expect blogger to delete the comment, delete all comments from that user, flag that user as a spammer etc.
Blogger, I would like to see you innovate which you seem to have stopped a while back.
Here is the post if you are wondering: http://virtualk...plications.html
1 word
Tumblr!
I’m betting on wordpress.com. I use wordpress all the time.
Blogs will stay around, but increasginly lose importance to outlet aggregators like Facebook, and indeed hyper messaging via the likes of Twitter, FriendFeed, will suck up a bunch of user effort.
Blogger is an excellent platform for first-time bloggers. But once people want more control & customization they’ll move on to WordPress.
And Blogger then Twitter? Better work on improving those resumes Ev & Biz… pffft!
can I ask this Erick… Why did you mention Twitter in any of this? Your talking about blogging platforms and comparing them.
This is almost as irrelevant as you comparing traffic of two completely different web services, Twine and FF.
WTF? Blogger is blogging. Twitter is microblogging. And both services were created by the same guys.
I’d call him a dummy if he didn’t mention Twitter.
the last time I updated my blog is the same day i registered for it.
I never knew that people liked blogger
That’s one of the google products that I dont like. I prefer wordpress better.
Twitter is catching up quickly. I just notice a good case study from today’s news, which shows how people use twitter to share news early:
Today’s continental airline incident showed up as a daily new twitter topic at 8:29am PST on my web2express.org digest site. Something is amazing if you compare the time carefully. It emerged as hot topic on twitter while the flight was still in the air. Where did the tweets come from so early? Did someone tweet in the airplane? or people on the ground in Europe got the information early and tweet? Anyway, news travels on twitter fast, very fast!
While this news event was caught early by twitter digest on web2express.org, it was not on other trending applications including twitter search trending topics, google trends, yahoo buzz.
Here’s how this plays out:
People new to the internet start off with Twitter because of the celeb hype.
Then as they learn more, they start a blog at Blogger, simply because its easier and it says “Google” on top.
Then, when they get a bit more experienced with blogging and want more functionality, they choose Wordpress.
So its Twitter -> BLogger -> Wordpress
Personally, I wouldn’t give up Wordpress for anything
I used WordPress self-hosted, wordpress.com and Blogger. WordPress is superior because it’s easy to customise the design and add plugins.
You are hosted on Media Temple servers, not WordPress.com
I have written a fair amount regrading Blogspot SEO problems recently, and in the past have written about WordPress.com linking structure.
If Blogger improved what they are doing, you would see their growth similar or even higher, and potentially 400% more traffic.
Blogger still the choice. But not the competitor Twitter is growing very fast..Maybe blogger should come new features to take a lead back on cyber world.
i think that it is time for wordpress to dominates ;]
Isn’t the most obvious, fastest growing company in the space SquareSpace (besides Twitter)?
if one can’t host his own blog, then, I believe that wordpress is better. However, one of the major reason that most people prefer blogger is that many of them have not even ever heard about wordpress.
Very interesting article. I have not heard about old school blogs in awhile.
1. Why is twitter on this list?
2. Blogger is good for newbie bloggers
3. Hosted Wordpress FTW!!!!!!!!!!
Nice article. Good job.
Usefull article! Hello from Russia!
Thanks for the post! Very useful information