I received an email last night from Ev Williams, founder of Blogger.com, one of (if not the) original blog publishing platforms, to inform users that the advanced features of the Pro version will be folded into the free version of the system, and the paid version, which I seem to recall cost $35 a year, will be discontinued. Blogger was, of course, acquired by Google earlier this year. Curiously, Ev wrote, in reference to the discontinuation of Pro, "It's sad but true. (Except it's not really that sad.)"
UPDATE: I just spoke with my buddy over there, Jason Shellen, program manager for Blogger, who shed some light on this for me. See notes from that below.
Jason explains, "We've always wanted to give away Blogger Pro features to all users," noting that they have "way more" free Blogger users than Pro users (he said last time he checked, registered accounts were up to 1.5 million, though he didn't have at hand the number of those that were active or an updated count). "Spell check alone could really increase the quality of a lot of blogs."
I asked him what this means from a revenue standpoint, whether this was any indication of Google lowering its expectations of Blogger as a revenue source, and he said definitely not. "Currently, all the users of Blogspot [Blogger's free blog hosting service] have Google AdSense ads on them. That's about as much we would want to say [on the revenue question] as a private company. If we have other product plans in the works, we're not announcing those today….
"A comparison could be made to Google itself. Google offers great free web search. We're offering, hopefully long-term, a great free web publishing tool. If anything, it's a step to make Blogger more prominent."
As thanks for their support, Blogger is offering all Pro users a Blogger "hoodie" sweatshirt, despite the fact that, in my case, I think I paid them more than a year ago at this point. Regardless, I signed up for my hoodie immediately. (I live in Harlem, so it's the right look, though I'm not sure what people will make of the Blogger logo. It's not exactly Rocawear or FUBU.)
Shellen added, "Also, everyone has been asking for sweatshirts, which we have lying around. So it's also a way to satisfy our friends' craving for Blogger sweatshirts." Amen to that!
He said that by end of day today, most of the advanced Pro features will be available to users of the free service. A few advanced features, notably XML syndication and the ability to post via email, are still available only to those former-Pro users (i.e., those features will remain active for those who had paid for the Pro version), but he said that they plan to roll those out to the free platform soon.
A bonus nugget of info gleaned from all this: Ev sent his email with an unfamiliar return address of "trakken.com," which I see from visiting that domain, reveals that Google acquired a company called Netonic, startup makers of an email distribution software, around the same time as they acquired Blogger, which I hadn't heard reported before.
