Was this just not profitable? Or not vc extra growth profitable?
It's frustrating though because imho it's arguably still the best blog platform to this day.
$500 ÷ 12 = 41.67 per month.
For a personal/fun publishing platform that might be a bit pricey, but that's less than what many people pay for their cell phone plan.
That being said, it still had as much tech debt as any other large application, not to mention being 100% Perl, which would have made sustaining engineering pretty difficult the last few years.
The biggest issue is that people have moved on from the sort of self-publishing that it made possible. Chronological blogs have been out of fashion for over a decade. I'm sad to see this happen but not surprised.
I guess the way I look at it is TypePad began with MT's "publish-then-serve" design, but scaled way up. I agree it wasn't actually directly downstream of MT. Regardless, after Seismic and Phenotype/etc. it looked like a three-tier web app, if a bit idiosyncratic.
I do often wish we were living in 6a's (in retrospect) polly-anna view of a future where everyone self-published and built community, instead of whatever... this world is.
As for the reasons for the shutdown, I can only speculate, but the maintenance costs for an old huge Perl codebase would likely be a factor. Also the current/final owner of TypePad is the same parent company as BlueHost, and for the past five years they've been refusing new TypePad users, and instead directing folks to BlueHost's paid WordPress hosting. So TypePad's revenue has been dropping for years by design, and consolidation of product offerings seems like the end-goal.
Yes. We call them newsletters now. Podcasts, if they're audio. Many are both.
Considering I also follow a few blogs, there are a silent crowd who reads blogs.
RSS is still alive, and if you're the type of person who doesn't just want the alg telling you what to look at next, then it's still valuable.
There's some many content creators right now, for example, who are specializing in sharing AI knowledge.