by SEO Consultant
J. Cave
J. Cave
This Sunday - August 23rd - Blogger will turn 10 years old. Perhaps, if you weren't blogging back in 1999, Blogger still seems like quite a new product. Truth be told, Blogger is an internet veteran and one that has managed to survive a number of industry challenges, particularly in the early years. Back in 1999, the internet landscape was completely different with only 150 million internet users worldwide. Services like Napster and Myspace were just hitting the web and Google had only opened its first office a year before.
Blogger - a term coined and branded by founders Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan - was publically released in beta format in August 1999.
Like many other start-ups at the same time, Blogger had given little thought to its revenue model. It wasn't long before the company (Pyra Labs) ran out of funds and, although many employees continued to work for free for several weeks, and even months, eventually the entire team - including co-founder Hourihan - walked out in protest.
For some time Evan Williams ran the company by himself until he managed to secure investment from Massachusetts software company Trellix. The investment from Trellix allowed Blogger to survive for almost another two years before eventually being purchased by Google under undisclosed terms.
Under the Trellix investment, advertising-supported Blogger and a premium service - Blogger Pro were born, however when Google made the purchase in 2003 all of the premium services were made free.
Blogger remained in beta format until December 2006, three years after the purchase from Google. In 2007, Blogger was ranked number 16 in a list of the top 50 domains by unique visitors according to Compete.
Today Blogger is the biggest blogging platform in the world and, to celebrate a decade of life, it plans to shower users with new features and presents which will be released as of this Sunday.
