What Happened to Xanga?Photo by Roan Lavery

 

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 important… what happened to Xanga.

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 audioblogs 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.

What happened to Xanga?

Now, when we’re talking about it, I mean what’s the website’s history and of course, its downfall.

The history of Xanga

Once it was launched, it started as a blogging website for sharing music and book reviews, no 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, 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 usership that hasn’t raised 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 eProps, comments, and subscriptions, something we’ll later discover to be an important factor in its downfall.Photoblog- Originally, 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 photo system 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 securityAudioblog- launched in September 2006Pulse- Also known as ,,carefree miniblog”, was launched in February 2007Videoblog- 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 of 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 in your subscription services, it’s very likely to lose a good amount of customers. Xanga, however, knew this, that’s why they offered a 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, where Premium Plus, provided unlimited photo storage and 1 Gb of monthly uploads. Besides these, the paid memberships brought much more benefits that really made a difference for the clients.

Ok, but what does it have to do with the website’s usership drop?

Well, it’s all about the customers, those who didn’t have or didn’t want to pay for the membership, 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 has suffered from a constant decline that hasn’t stopped a bit. Although the website was still operating afterward, 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 their 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.

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