The Swedish free daily newspaper Metro has been hosting blogs on its blogging platform Metrobloggen.se since 2007. Back then it was described as an immediate success, with more than 2,000 registered blogs during its first 36 hours of operation. The original idea was to share advertising revenue with bloggers, but that model was soon ditched. And apparently the blogs have not generated enough revenue to keep the platform running, because Metro announced today that it is shutting down the service on April 25.
Metrobloggen.se is currently home to at least 10,000 blogs, possibly a lot more. Many are of course no longer active, but Metro’s decision comes as a blow to many bloggers who are left with no help in transferring to a new host. In a note today, Metro says:
“You can continue to blog on Metrobloggen as usual until April 25. After that date, the site can no longer be accessed and no content will be available or saved any longer.
Up until April 25, you can manually or in other ways save your content. Metrobloggen can unfortunetely not provide any tools or help in order to automatically copy your content.”
Exporting content to another blog platform
I do not oppose the closing down of this platform per se, I am sure they have looked into the business model and found that it doesn’t make good business sense to continue. But it’s sad that they offer no help for the bloggers who have generated millions of page views and ad impressions. Metro could have come up with some means to export the content and easily transfer it to another blogging platform. Many bloggers will probably not bother to copy and paste every single blog post and move it elsewhere.
WordPress has an RSS importer for self hosted blogs, but I haven’t tried how it works and most of the bloggers at Metrobloggen probably are looking for easier solutions like blogg.se or blogger.com.
Metro says they are working on a solution, but they say there is no guarantee they will find one before they close the site down.
Update: Ted Valentin has developed a solution to help bloggers export their blogs from Metrobloggen to Blogger or WordPress. Check it out here.
It’s very poor community management by Metro. In many ways it is similar to the recent decision of the BBC to remove/delete 172 “old” websites. (Read this article for a bit more info http://adactio.com/journal/4336/ )
The better option here, as it would be for the BBC, is to “freeze” the sites. Ie stop new content being published, but leave existing content available. They could then allow users to log in, but offer them just the option then to close/remove the site (perhaps with redirect as an option if they were feeling generous and it was practical).
Hosting costs will be next to nothing (and fall continuously over time as posts become older and less frequently visited), development costs would end – but importantly, you’ve shown a bit of understanding and good will to the community they have built up.
/James.
Couldn’t agree with you more, James. Hope the tool that Ted Valentin has developed works, see updated blog post.