Blox.pl

» see blox.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Blox was the blog platform of Agora, the Warsaw company that publishes Gazeta Wyborcza. It opened in March 2004 as part of the Gazeta.pl portal and it required a Gazeta.pl account, so every blogger on it was also a registered reader of the newspaper's website. Blogs sat on subdomains of blox.pl.

For 2004 the toolset was serious. There was a plain text editor beside three WYSIWYG ones, RSS feeds for posts and for comments, categories, TrackBack between blogs, and templates that users could build and hand to each other. The platform spoke the MetaWeblog API, which let people write offline. One Windows client, Bloxer, mangled Polish letters by saving them as Windows-1250. A second one called Bloxie got the encoding right and asked for .NET 2.0 in return.

Polish Wikipedia counts more than 30,000 blogs in the middle of 2005 and more than 90,000 a year later.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the names on the masthead ~

Spider's Web, writing just after the closure was announced, put the golden age around 2008, when the most-read bloggers in the country were on Blox. The pseudonymous political blogger Kataryna wrote there. So did two Gazeta Wyborcza journalists, the sportswriter Rafał Stec and the finance columnist Maciej Samcik. Kominek, who later crowned himself king of the Polish blogosphere, passed through for a while. The same article said the platform looked archaic even in its best years, and that Agora never put real money into it.

~ what gemius counted ~

I do not read Polish, so Blox reaches me as numbers. The Gemius/PBI panel, quoted by Wirtualnemedia, gives it 3.9 million users and 34.6 million page views in December 2012, a reach of 20.14 percent of Polish internet users. By December 2015 that was 3.03 million users and 18.3 million views. In December 2018 it was 2.06 million users and 6.35 million views, for a reach of 7.33 percent.

Users fell by about half in six years while page views fell by more than four fifths, which suggests the remaining visitors landed on one old post from a search engine and went no further. Agora had already closed Blox Lite in December 2017. That was the mini-blog version embedded in its other sites, Tokfm.pl and Bryla.pl among them.

~ until 30 november ~

Agora announced the closure on 27 February 2019. The notice to bloggers began "Bardzo nam przykro", we are very sorry, and said that in fifteen years of Blox the internet had changed almost beyond recognition. The statement to the trade press was blunter. Interest in blog platforms had been shrinking for a long time, it said, "in particular those that do not offer the possibility of creating sites on a separate domain". Onet's blog.pl and Wirtualna Polska's Bloog had both closed by March 2018.

The platform went offline on 29 April 2019. Posts and images could be downloaded until 30 November 2019, or moved to WordPress.com with a guide Agora wrote. Comments and statistics could not be exported at all. Today blox.pl answers with a redirect to the Gazeta.pl forums.

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