What if your blog disappeared?
Not because of some hiccup or snafu.
But because your free blogging service decided you were doing something wrong and simply shut you down?
That’s what happened with Tumblr users recently:
The protections afforded by intellectual property law have immensely benefitted technology companies, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not sometimes problematic. From ridiculous patent lawsuits to reverse domain name hijacking, IP is often a means to questionable ends.
Unfortunately, when it comes to trademark, some companies are making abuse all too easy.
Case in point: Tumblr’s treatment of well-known Microsoft employee Danah Boyd’s account. Yesterday, Boyd reported that the popular online publishing platform provider revoked her account subdomain, zephoria.tumblr.com, and handed it over to an internet marketing firm called Zephoria.
Following a post on her blog at zephoria.org, Boyd, who commands quite a large social media following, was contacted by Tumblr.
The company’s CEO, David Karp, confirmed that zephoria.tumblr.com had been taken away from Boyd due to a trademark complaint. According to Karp, Boyd was notified by email about the complaint, but never responded.
According to Boyd’s account, Tumblr president John Maloney indicated that her Tumblr subdomain was transferred to Zephoria a mere 72 hours after the notification was sent.
Boyd isn’t the only being mistreated by Tumblr this way, either. If you read the article you’ll see this isn’t the only case.
You Can Always Ask for Your Money Back, Right?
Tumblr is also notorious for simply not working. As in the service is down.
How are you supposed to run a business site when people can’t reach it to do business with you?
Hey, you can always ask for your money back, right? Oh, wait… Tumblr is free.
Seems to me like the price of free is kinda steep.
WordPress Dot Come On
There’s always WordPress.com, right? Or, as I like to call it: WordPress.comeon. Here’s some of the complete lack of control you have:
- You can’t run ads on your blog unless you have massive traffic, and then you’re obligated to split the ad revenue with WordPress.
- WordPress states in its terms of service it has the right to run ads on your blog, and you have no say in the matter. For a business site, this means your competition could be showing up in the ads. Nice.
- You can’t change your theme much beyond whatever customization is allowed by the canned theme you choose. If you want any customization beyond that you have a pay a fee so you can customize the CSS of your theme. This isn’t terribly flexible and makes it difficult to get the branding and design you want for your site.
- You can’t install any of the thousands of awesome plugins available to self-hosted WordPress blogs which give you an edge with SEO, ecommerce, list-building, and many other important business objectives. You get what WordPress decides to give you and that’s it.
Blogger? Please
The problem with making a viable business site on Blogger is that it takes so much work to make your blog look like it means real business you may as well do it right and use a self-hosted WordPress blog. Consider:
- It takes the same amount of time to get a custom design (and Blogger designers are much rarer than WordPress designers).
- You have to hide that stupid Blogger bar at the top so you don’t look amateur, which requires a bit of custom CSS.
- You also have to hide it so morons don’t report your blog to Google as being in violation of the terms of service.
- Blogger comments look like total ass and you’ll need to replace them with a third party commenting system.
- You have no ability to really extend Blogger’s functionality like you do with WordPress plugins. You have no chance to do certain on-page SEO tasks, like write a meta description or edit your title separately from your post headline.
- Blogger has Google’s lame attempts at social media built into it which few people really use or care about unless they’re also Blogger users.
Sovereignty
The word you’re looking for is sovereignty. As in, being sovereign and having sovereignty over your online business operations and marketing:
Sovereignty is the quality of having supreme, independent authority over a territory.
- Your domain
- Your DNS service
- Your web hosting
- Your blog installed, configured and designed the way you want.
The price of free isn’t worth it.
Image attribution: epSos.de
I always say “free ain't cheap”. Really important points here Michael. Hopefully these specifics will help some people make a better decision. Sometimes you need to get bitten in the ass a couple times to learn how expensive it is to run on someone else's platform. Some people are just convinced that $7 a month or whatever is too much for a website. Really? Uh…you get what you pay for
Every time stories like this happen, it's worth pointing out. $7.00/month is
pretty fuckin' cheap rent, if you ask me, compared to the old days where
running business meant more like $7000/month at LEAST in overhead.
This is why it is better to pay than making it for free especially if your site is now going a bit important.
Good perspective Mickey. Free=too good to be true. That doesn't keep me from using Posterous for a couple blogs though. Free to write and create, not tinker with settings, installs and spam.
Yeah I have a posterous blog for my personal blog, and I do it precisely
because there's barely anything for me to have to manage on it. But I'd
never use it for a business blog.
Yeah free blogs are a waste, typically. The only time I'd really suggest getting a free blog is when the blogger has no inclination of making money or really promoting the blog, it's just there for them to write what's on their mind or maybe to talk about themselves.
I've heard it time and time again from newbies: “I'll just start with a free blog and then later on if I like it I'll move on to a paid blog”.
Like you mentioned before… really? $7/mo. is too much? Also, once the site picks up steam and you have to move it they'll run into a host of problems they'll need to fix, such as:
- Invest a large amount of time (or money) into moving the site
- All the SEO traffic they've built up will be gone
- Invest in building a new site
And some hosting companies even give you your money back for any months you didn't use should you decide to cancel (and you prepaid for x amount of months).
John, the one big regret people have is that they wish they had moved from
free to self-hosted sooner. You're absolutely right.
FYI: Your domain isn't resolving via my SBC/Yahoo default DNS. I had to switch to Google's public DNS to get here.
Do a post about why free hosting means your site can disappear, and your site disappears. #irony
Yeah there is some weird DNS issue from time to time. I am moving hosts
which will solve the problem. Irony for the win!
Too funny, but it happens to the best of us. Michael, you never cease to impress (and entertain) me! “WordPress Dot Come On” I may just have to borrow that. Back on topic… I don’t even like those ‘site hosts’ I just shake my head when I see businesses asking for help because they built their site on something like Wix. ~David Walker
David Walker recently posted..I’m A Scammer
Glad you find value and humor in what I do! Thanks for being here.
Michael Martine recently posted..17 Ways to Turn Your Blog Readers into Loyal Fans
G'Day Michael,
Some smarter heads than mine advised me to avoid “free” domains and the like. So I took their advice. After a long time in business I've learned that there's a difference between “free” and “at no charge,” especially in the shady, slithery world of online marketing.
I'd also like to commend you for bringing issues such as this to the attention of non-savvy readers such as myself. I, for one, don't know what I don't know.
Make sure…… Best wishes
Leon
Exactly, nothing ever is free, there are always trade-offs. Some you can
live with, some you can't. If you're inexperienced you don't know the
difference. If you have an inkling about some small fraction of what you
don't know, you can seek out help.
There are a ton of food bloggers (like me) on Blogger.com and I'm astounded by the Comment traffic they get… oh wait, they ARE mostly blogger.com users. Seems like it's a limited or “gated community” of a given set of readers.
I'm happy to pay for a monthly service that gives me control over how my site looks, acts and delivers MY content.
It's a small price to pay for better SEO, control over content and design aspects.
Brian, yes, Blogger and Google are pushing their own set of sharing and
following tools for this but there's a much wider world not using Blogger or
these tools. So it seems engaging and active when in fact you're in a bit of
a bubble.
For moving from Blogger to WordPress, see this step-by-step guide:
http://ow.ly/4KVUp
That guide for moving to WordPress is good stuff. But I wanted to clarify that I've been a happy user of my self hosted WordPress install for years.
I wasn't entirely sure from your comment so I figured if nothing else
suggesting that book would help others. Glad to hear it!
They can take down your blog even if it is self-hosted, for trademark or copyright claims, so if you want to play it safe you have to have your own server, and even then…
This is true, but if your DNS is with a separate entity you can simply point
the nameservers to a new hosting account. If you've been backing up your
blog like you're supposed to, you'd be back in business in no time.
Peter – I have a postereous blog hosted by my website – does this pass the test? Cheers and thanks for your great advice!
I have a network of blogs linking to each other by rss. and the are self promoted, they seem to be ranking quite well in google.
I couldn't agree more. You really do get what you pay for. I don't know about the USA but here in the UK you still find many small businesses using their 'free' ISP e-mail address for business and paying for it sign written across their vehicles etc. Your reasoned observations would apply to them equally well. Register a domain name and use it!
Considering most online entrepreneurs don't drive much because they work at
home, that's even more funny to me.
With your own blog much of the traffic comes from search engines so its important to work on your SEO to grow your blog. The problem comes if you use a free hosted service you don't ever own that site and if you want to move you can't take the blogs power with you.
Its like the difference between owning a house and renting one. No matter how much work you do with your rental you will only increase the value of the house for the owner and when you want to move you get nothing for your efforts.
Where as if you tidy up your own house. change the kitchen and bathrooms and make down stairs open plan your likely to increase the value of the property and when you move house you will be able to take the equity with you to the next place. Great post
There are ways to preserve ranking and link authority but the very nature of
how people begin with such services almost always means they're never savvy
enough to set them up correctly for this. Love the house analogy!
[...] but poignant fact: free isn’t always free. This is particularly interesting when it comes to free blogging services. Tumblr can take you down at any time, WordPress.com can run ads on your site without your [...]
Micheal! every post are belong to you in this blog…
but i want to thanks for your helpful comments…
The comparatively close release dates of both OS X ten.6 Snow Leopard
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Windows 7 may be the closest Microsoft has gotten to offering a desktop
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dare they say it, as potentially Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate secure as Apple has delivered with OS X.
I think, You are right. The problem with making a viable business site on Blogger is that it takes so much work to make your blog look like it means real business you may as well do it right and use a self-hosted WordPress blog.
business courses
Exactly. Thanks for your comment.
Hi Michael,
Very well put.
If you are remotely serious about your online presence, use the free platforms solely for SEO purposes and don’t count on them. HubPages recently pulled the rug out from my feet on what I considered nice sites. They were just supporting the businesses I work for, however they ranked first page google for some terms until they went bye bye.
I understand that starting out, learning the basics of getting a domain name, setting nameservers, ftp, etc. is a headache the first time. BUT, I felt I just got a new toy for Christmas when I set up my first site. I owned it!
RJ Ulbricht recently posted..Rebates on Veterinary Provided Products
I’m sorry you had to go through that, but it’s a really strong example of exactly what I’m talking about here. You can pay a very high price for a free blog. Glad to see you’re on a better track, now!
Michael Martine recently posted..Why “Know, Like and Trust” Could be Killing Your Blog
Thank you, sir!
Great post. I’m currently writing a series about Blogging for Free. I will provide a link to this post when I’m finished as another informations source.
I use self-hosted blogs and have done since I started blogging however for many people the cost is ‘too much’. Your post really shows that “free is not worth it.”
Thanks
Tania Shipman recently posted..Blogging for Free Part 4 – Settings