I don't think there's a convincing one but I think it's pretty obvious, no?
-These days, people are pretty unlikely to pay just to have a blog when there are tons of free alternatives
-Blogging itself has experienced massive decline with social media & short-form video
-Even if they did want to pivot into a more contemporary model, migrating a stack that old and with that many dependencies would be extremely difficult
Of course it'd be nice to preserve, but I imagine the business was on life support and mainly supported by holdovers and with close to zero new customers.
I wonder how much the death of advertising on the open web has to do with it.
I mean, it's funny how things are going. Google, Twitter and even Facebook started with really open websites, but then started closing off more and more of "their" portion of the web. And now their dream has paid off: the open web is more or less gone.
And the winner is (or might very well be) Tiktok and ChatGPT.
Well done, guys. Brilliant strategy. Perhaps you should get a big bonus this year.
Just went there to check it out, it opened the front page in Russian(?) for me, even though English was selected in the top right. I re-selected English, it refreshed the page... in Russian. Close tab.
Some discussion on the shutdown a month ago:
Typepad is shutting down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45041807
Is there an explainer somewhere as to why they closed down?
I don't think there's a convincing one but I think it's pretty obvious, no?
-These days, people are pretty unlikely to pay just to have a blog when there are tons of free alternatives
-Blogging itself has experienced massive decline with social media & short-form video
-Even if they did want to pivot into a more contemporary model, migrating a stack that old and with that many dependencies would be extremely difficult
Of course it'd be nice to preserve, but I imagine the business was on life support and mainly supported by holdovers and with close to zero new customers.
At some point, you need to close down.
I wonder how much the death of advertising on the open web has to do with it.
I mean, it's funny how things are going. Google, Twitter and even Facebook started with really open websites, but then started closing off more and more of "their" portion of the web. And now their dream has paid off: the open web is more or less gone.
And the winner is (or might very well be) Tiktok and ChatGPT.
Well done, guys. Brilliant strategy. Perhaps you should get a big bonus this year.
it's a newfold brand (EIG). that's all I needed to see to explain the shutdown.
and, livejournal.com is still around.
single-handedly financed by ad revenue from people refreshing GRRM's not-blog for updates on the Winds of Winter
That moved to a wordpress site in 2018. See https://grrm.livejournal.com/ and https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/
Just went there to check it out, it opened the front page in Russian(?) for me, even though English was selected in the top right. I re-selected English, it refreshed the page... in Russian. Close tab.
I can go to my own and it's a time machine from 2012.
I'm not saying use it, but it is still there.
RIP