Of late I have been reading lot of blogs and almost 70% of them are hosted on paid domains, be it personal, technical or business blogs and only 30% of them are using the free blogging platforms like Blogger (the one I’m using), typepad etc. So does it mean that having a paid domain is needed for a successful blog?

Here are some of the quotes about having a paid domain for blogging.

Jakob Nielsen, in his post Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes states that

Having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having an @aol.com email address or a Geocities website: the mark of a naïve beginner who shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

American Blogoshere says,

If you have a highly successful blog on blogspot you are building up an asset for Google and not just yourself. They also have control of your site’s fate instead of you.

Yuga in the list of Seven deadly sins of blogging says;

I like to take emphasis more on the first bullet point there — using free blog hosting services like BlogSpot, IMO, takes away a huge amount of credibility from your blog especially if nobody knows you, and much more if you hide your identity by not having an about page or even a contact email.This all gives the impression that your blog is all about those AdSense and Chitika ads plastered all over your blog stuffed with showbiz keywords (or cancer, sexy nude pictures, mortgage, credit cards, wow gold for that matter). And, btw, if you really believe you can earn some considerable amount cash from your Adsense, please do re-invest some of it back to your blog by getting a domain and hosting.

I agree with American Blogoshere that when we have a successful blog, why give the credit to others. In that sense getting a paid domain is better. But I beg to differ with Jakob Nielsen on the view that having a blog ending with a blogspot domain will be considered as beginners and will not be taking seriously. I have been reading lot of popular blogs, the A-List bloggers who are still using the blogger domains to host their blogs. Further having a blog on blogspot domain doesn’t always mean that your blog is full of Adsense, stuffed with credit card ads and sexy nude pictures. Also having your blog hosted on blogspot doesn’t mean that we cannot have a about page or a contact Email. One thing which I felt good about paid domains is that we can have complete control of the settings (like design and pages) of the blog and we also get more space to host our files, other that these I couldn’t find any other relevant advantages of having a paid domain.

Although I’m very much satisfied with my blogspot domain, I’m planning to get a domain for me. Its not because of any of the reasons listed above, but for the fact that I always want to have control of the UI and pages in my blog.

Comments welcome.

Technorati tags: Blogger, Blogging, PaidDomains, Adsense, FreeDomains, Blogspot

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