(From J Spot) Did I hear that right? i.PH, the local blog service is now offering their uber-cool blogging tool for free. Well, it’s about time, though it should have been done earlier this year (to get a head start).
In this day and age that almost anything and everything can be had from the internet is free, a paid service that does not have a very compeling and unique offering will someday become either obsolete or turn to the free service model. Blogger is free. WordPress.com is also free and will soon take a (huge) bite at TypePad‘s market. i.Ph did just that, turning a locally developed paid blog service to something every blogger can now have for free. :)
I’ve seen how much they’ve invested in customizing and improving Calliope and they deserve much credit for that. Revenue can be taken from other sources other than the users themselves. Gmail went from zero to 2.5GB of free email just to boost their ad exposure without asking a single penny from any Tom, Dick and Harry.
They now have AdSense ads displayed in the gallery section of each blog account. A nice move and a wise one, I might add. I’m not saying that income from these ads can compensate for the lost in revenue due to the move but it is a start. How about co-branding with local corporate sponsors? Or maybe Run-of-Network ads. There are a lot of other possibilities to recoup the investments here. One just have to look a bit further.
Let me get an account and do a more thorough review. ;)
used to have an account at I.PH which i was trying to resurrect. Sad to say online help doesn’t help at all, my experience. Especially if you’re in the middle of editing template it will frustrate you when something goes wrong and pop-up thing suddenly doesn’t work. Hope they still improve.