Baidu today announced the closure of its blogging service Baidu Space, after an eight year run. The site will be officially put to rest on April 21st, and posts on the site will be transferred to Baidu Cloud on May 7th. The posts will then be available to the original poster only.
Baidu made the announcement in a public release, and also released the information via Weibo and the Yueguang blog.
In 2008, the blog site was listed as Number 11 on the Top Social Media Sites of 2008 with 40 million unique worldwide visitors. The site opened in 2006 during a peak for Chinese long-form blogging sites, but has since declined.
The blog service, which was directly connected to Baidu’s website, had been drawing low site traffic for some time.
While Baidu once claimed to have the largest blogging network in China, the Sina Weibo blog service has since built a virtual monopoly, hosting what are easily the largest microblogging and long-form blogging services in the country.
According to Baidu, Baidu Space was not able to meet margins in the blogging space and the company says they are going to redirect resources from the outdated service, giving way to the more popular micro-services offered by WeChat and Sina Weibo.
The ousted blog sites’ slogan was “let the world find you”, but it now looks like the dead blogs will be only available to one person, the original writer.
Users’ blogs will remain unchanged but completely frozen. The token calligraphy style, original text, images as well as video links will remain. However comments, personal messages and fan numbers will no longer be available.
From April 21st, Baidu Space will stop posting stories and blog articles, setting to rest another piece of Chinese internet history.
Image Credit: Baidu Space
Editing by Mike Cormack (@bucketoftongues)