NetEase Blog (网易博客), the giant’s blog site and service, announced last night (August 20, 2018) that they will suspend all services and operations starting from November 30, 2018, our sister site is reporting (in Chinese).
According to an official statement (in Chinese), starting from midnight August 21, NetEase Blog has closed all user-end download channels, new blogger registrations, and VIP top-up services. The Blog also says users can no longer upload content or comment on existing ones. On November 30, the whole site, including all servers, will be shut-down.
But the end of NetEase Blog is not the end of NetEase’s personal content sharing business. The company encourages bloggers to transfer the content to Lofter, a light blog brand launched in late August 2011 under NetEase. Lofter allows users to share personal text and visual content with a stylish user interface (UI), closer community management, and better sharing settings for mobile devices.
Blogging, the sharing and networking format itself, has seen global collapses including that of My Space. Domestically, Tencent-backed WeChat, Sina-backed Weibo, and short video platforms such as Douyin are squeezing traditional online content sharing and interpersonal relationship models’ living space. Nevertheless, the shutdown is unlikely to have much significant or substantial influence on the company’s operation or fiscal performance.
NetEase Blog’s declining influence before the shut-down already implied a ceiling for advertising services and other related commercial earning-generation opportunities in the blogging sector. The company was aware of the situation and has been cultivating new profit channels such as games.
Additionally, according to the company’s unaudited fiscal report for the second quarter of 2018, the company now has a portfolio of major revenue consisting of online games, e-commerce, advertising services, and e-mail. Among the advertising sector, the top performing verticals in the same period were automobiles, internet services, and real estate.