When I started blogging as a pastime in late 2008, Google’s Blogger was a great choice of platforms. It was free and easy to use and had the financial backing of an internet powerhouse. I wasn’t worried about it disappearing like other platforms.
Also, in the first five years of blogging, I received annual checks of more than $100 each just for allowing advertisements on my Tech-media-tainment blog. Then there was a change in Google’s algorithms and traffic dried up.
Last week I removed the ads from Tech-media-tainment and canceled my revenue-sharing Google AdSense account. The reason was that Google kept increasing the ad counts on the page and the ads became increasingly intrusive.
Tech-media-tainment started with a static banner ad at the top of the page and another between the first and second articles. But that eventually changed to pop-up ads and advertisements on the top and left and right. The main ad forced users to manually close it like a window shade to read the article.
The last straw was when Google added contextual ads in the description of my blog: “Entertainment, pop culture, personal technology and media.” Google said it was an experiment, but I had no way to turn it off. It was ugly and confusing.
The changes at Google’s Blogger fit the definition of “enshittification,” where a service starts out user-friendly but becomes worse as the company increasingly tries to monetize it.
I hope this isn’t the beginning of the end for Blogger. I’d hate to have to export all my work to another service like WordPress or Substack, because I don’t know what to expect there. Plus, that would be a ton of work and create a lot of dead links.
Even Google Gemini admits that Blogger is rarely updated anymore, calling it “an absolute relic of the early 2000s web.”
“There is always a tiny, looming fear that Google might ‘sunset’ it one day like they do with many legacy projects,” Gemini said. Does Google’s AI chatbot know something Google hasn’t said yet?
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