Blogger Pro

» see pro.blogger.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Pyra Labs had almost no money left by early 2001. The staff went, and Evan Williams kept Blogger running on his own while the registered user count climbed toward a million and the revenue stayed at roughly nothing. Blogger Pro was the answer to that arithmetic: charge the people who were already using the thing every single day, and leave the free version alone.

It opened in February 2002. The introductory price was $35 for a year, with the real price planned at $50 once the feature list was finished, and the terms of service on free Blogger changed on 28 February to make room for it. The pitch was partly speed, since paying users were promised servers that were not carrying the whole free tier, and partly a set of features that would be baffling to charge for now.

Google bought Pyra Labs on 13 February 2003. By that August the order page was reporting that Blogger Pro purchasing was offline while the team retooled, and readers were told to check back next week. What actually came back, in September, was a page headed "Announcing: Free Features for Everyone", with a subheading underneath it that read "Wither Blogger Pro?". Everything behind the paywall had been moved in front of it.

~ the dossier ~

~ what thirty-five dollars bought ~

Spellchecking. Drafts you could leave unfinished. Titles on posts, dates you could set yourself, daily archives instead of only weekly and monthly ones, a post template that loaded your usual formatting, and publishing over SFTP if your web host supported it. Every one of those is a checkbox in a settings panel today and none of them is a product.

The subscription came with a quota, since bandwidth in 2002 was a real cost to a company with no cash: 100KB of posts a month, and $3 for each additional 100KB, which you had to approve before you were charged. There was a thirty-day refund window. The upgrade page itself only worked in Internet Explorer, and told you so in a JavaScript alert if you turned up in anything else.

~ paying for it from here ~

In 2002 I was finishing school in Turkey on a dial-up line, and the free web was the only web that was actually reachable. That was not about the $35. It was about what $35 required: a card cleared for international use, billed in dollars, at an age when most people in this country did not have one and the ones who did were not spending it on post titles.

So the version of Blogger that traveled was the free one, and Blogspot with it. The paid tier that funded the thing was invisible from here for the whole nineteen months it existed, and then it stopped existing, and the features arrived anyway.

~ the email ~

The September announcement pointed at a second page, which was the message sent to paying subscribers. It is signed "Ev" and it is not a form letter. Williams writes that Pro subscribers helped keep the company going as a struggling start-up when servers and bandwidth were at an extreme premium, that Blogger is part of Google now, that Google has lots of computers, and that this puts them in the position of being able to give something back.

Existing subscriptions stayed valid, because a couple of features were not being freed yet, RSS output and posting by email among them. Anyone who had paid and never canceled was offered a Blogger hooded sweatshirt, claimable through a form until 1 October 2003, or a pro-rated refund if they preferred the money. A line was added to the bottom of that page later, after the deadline had passed, hoping everyone who signed up enjoyed theirs.

Pyra had roughly a million registered users by then and a paying base small enough that sweatshirts were a sane way to close the account. The subscription revenue it replaced is usually put somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands a year, which was the entire company for a while.

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