AOL steers Journals bloggers to Google service
AOL has begun notifying bloggers who've used its Journals site that they should move their content to Google's Blogger or bid it adieu. — The company, which is winnowing down its properties to improve its financial performance …
Context & Ripple Effects
AOL's decision to shut down Journals and push its bloggers to Google's Blogger is an early move in the company's long campaign to shed low-value properties and refocus on profitability — a culling instinct that resurfaces years later when AOL begins cutting entire content sites outright. It also marks a telling reversal: in 2007 AOL was busy borrowing blog culture for itself, relaunching its news product around blog-style publishing, and now it is handing the community-publishing burden to a rival. The choice of Google as the landing spot extends an existing relationship rather than starting one — AOL had already coaxed Google into experimenting with busier ad formats years earlier.
First-order effects
- Journals bloggers face a hard deadline: export their posts to Google's Blogger or lose their archives entirely, making Google the immediate beneficiary of AOL's retrenchment.
- AOL trims another community-generated property from its portfolio, directly reducing hosting and moderation costs as part of its stated push to improve financial performance.
Second-order effects
- Google gains a wave of migrated blogs and their traffic at near-zero acquisition cost, deepening the AOL–Google partnership beyond search and advertising into hosted publishing.
- Other portal-era operators running legacy user-content communities face pressure to make the same call — migrate users to third-party platforms or shut down — since standalone blog hosting is hard to justify financially.
Third-order effects
- The episode foreshadows a structural pattern in which user-created web content consolidates onto a handful of large platforms, leaving individual companies as curators and renters of infrastructure they once owned.
- It also previews the boom-and-bust cycle of corporate blogging programs: AOL abandons DIY blogger communities in 2008, then pivots to professionally managed networks like Patch — which later swells to thousands of bloggers in what management calls a 'full-on course correction' before further cuts follow.
The trend: Legacy portals are steadily exiting self-hosted user-generated content, concentrating community publishing on a few dominant platforms even as their own content strategies swing between amateur and professional models.