What Happened to Xanga?
With the advent of the Internet, companies started to notice immediately the heavy attachment between people and the Internet. Due to this, they started creating web applications to allow society to visit and use their services way easier.
With that being said, today I’m gonna talk to you about Xanga, about what it is, its history and most importantly… what happened to Xanga.
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Xanga, once a popular blogging and social networking site, faced a significant decline due to various factors. One of the main reasons was the constant changes in its interface, which made the site confusing and less appealing to users. This, combined with its reliance on a subscription model for premium features, made Xanga less competitive. During this period, newer platforms with better functionalities for blogging and social media emerged, such as WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, making Xanga seem obsolete. Despite these challenges and the decline in user base, Xanga is not completely extinct. The company still exists and is working on launching Xanga 2.0, signalling an effort to revive and update the platform.
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What is Xanga?
For those who aren’t familiar with it, Xanga is a website that anchors from blogs like weblogs to photo, video, and audio blogs along with social networking profiles as well. It operates by Xanga.com, Inc, and was created by John Miller, Marc Ginsburg and Dan Huddle being launched on April 4, 1999 (wikipedia.org).
What happened to Xanga?
Now, when we’re talking about it, I mean what’s the website’s history and of course, its downfall.
Does the Xanga website still exist?
The Xanga website is not as online as it was at the beginning of the millennium. The domain is still online and owned by an undisclosed business in Burlington. The website is therefore online still, but there is nothing of value there.
You can still see what the website used to look like at archive.org
The history of Xanga
Once it was launched, it started as a blogging website for sharing music and book reviews, not long after which it became very popular. The blog followed up by creating and developing a series of e-mail recruitment procedures via GeoCities in early 2000. After plenty of formatting switches, Xanga divided its featured content and replaced it with classic and premium views in 2002. It didn’t take long until profile features that coincide with today’s most social media apps like friends nudges, chat forums, and audio and video capability were received as well…
These features have expanded the website and kept it on top all until 2007.
That’s when multiple internet metrics websites found a significant decline in terms of Xanga’s users that hasn’t risen up since that time.
Still, before stepping into the downfall details, let me cover up the Core features that Xanga has introduced over its rise.
Members of Xanga have benefited from
Weblog
They first added weblogs in November 2000 introducing consecutively items like props, comments, and subscriptions, something we’ll later discover to be an important factor in its downfall.
Photoblog
In 2001, photos could be uploaded only within weblogs posts, only to premium members and had a limit of 20 MB of storage.
However, In April 2005, Xanga has released a new photo manager that had an overall better photosystem to provide better picture quality and resolution as well as more storage capacity
Profile
Xanga upgraded profiles by increasing the data holding capacity and offering better email security
Audio blog
Launched in September 2006Pulse- Also known as “carefree miniblog”, was launched in February 2007
Videoblog
video ability was introduced in august 2007, starring a Xanga partner
Now that you know its history and how exactly Xanga reached its peak, let’s talk about its decadence.
The downfall of Xanga
According to them, they gave up on the enterprise because there was too much work. Although it does not refer to every one of them, the public has speculated right away that there is something else in the middle, income more exactly. Talking about the mid-2000s, most the website did not produce revenue from marketing and investing like most of today’s websites, but from subscriptions.
Now, if you didn’t know, in the world of online services, unless you give some real value to your subscription services, it’s very likely to lose a good amount of customers. Xanga, however, knew this, that’s why they offered free membership and 2 other premium ones. The free membership was infested by advertisement banners and unwanted popups, something you could’ve avoided if you paid a Premium or Premium Plus subscription.
The Premium plan supplied customers with 2 Gb of photo storage and 100 Mb of monthly uploads, whereas Premium Plus, provided unlimited photo storage and 1 Gb of monthly uploads. Besides these, the paid memberships brought many more benefits that really made a difference for the clients.
Ok, but what does it have to do with the website’s user drop?
Well, it’s all about the customers, those who didn’t have or didn’t want to pay for the membership, and couldn’t get the same picture quality, size and capacity for their blogs, which was very frustrating for them.
This was the moment when other enterprises saw the opportunity to step in and take the lead. When WordPress came in with free access to much better functionality and free blogs, it was inevitable for Xanga users to switch their blogging platform. In 2007, Xanga suffered from a constant decline that hasn’t stopped since.
Although the website was still operating afterwards, it clearly was dethroned by more popular social media applications like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.
Xanga has tried to come up with a new version in 2014, but it has brought no success, unfortunately.
The website is the perfect example of an online service that has tried to become the greatest in its field but ended up beaten by the competition.
It was a group that wanted and did accomplish a lot, and despite that they eventually failed, we should respect their effort and learn from their mistakes.
