Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in 2005, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In December 2004, Microsoft launched MSN Spaces, a free, deprecated blogging tool baked directly into the MSN Messenger ecosystem. Within five months, he had collected more than seven million blogs. Within a year, it became the largest blogging platform on the internet by volume.
To most observers, it seemed like a success story. For Six Apart—the company behind Movable Type, TypePad, and LiveJournal—it looked like something else entirely: a warning.
An analysis of MSN Spaces’ early growth in 2005 raised a question the blogging world wasn’t quite ready to ask. What happens when a platform giant decides your market is worth owning?
MSN Spaces playbook
Microsoft’s entry into blogging was no accident. MSN Messenger had approximately 150 million users worldwide at the time of Spaces’ launch. Integrating blogging directly into that ecosystem has given the platform a distribution advantage that no independent blogging company can realistically match. The venues didn’t need to be better. It just had to be there, already open, already connected to where hundreds of millions of people spend their time.
Growth figures reflect this. In its first month, Bill Gates claimed that Spaces had reached one million users. By April 2005, over seven million blogs were reported to have been created, an increase of about 100,000 per day. The platform was on track to reach ten million blogs by mid-May – making it the largest English-language blogging service in the world.
The most acute threat to Six Apart was to LiveJournal, which it acquired a few months earlier in January 2005. LiveJournal’s audience was very young—teens and early twenties—the demographic most appealing to Spaces with existing Messenger habits. LiveJournal has already grown 14 million accounts Six Apart eventually sold it, but active engagement told a different story. During the months of MSN Spaces’ rapid growth, LiveJournal’s active user count barely budged, even as signups grew.
Netscape problem
The 2005 analysis launched Netscape for a reason. Microsoft dethroned the dominant browser not through superior engineering, but through integration — bundling Internet Explorer with Windows until the market simply stopped looking elsewhere. Six Apart’s concern was that the same logic applied to blogging.
Microsoft typically does not enter markets to compete. Enter to connect. And with Spaces built into the messaging platform that touches hundreds of millions of users, the consolidation mechanism was already in place. For TypePad, Six Apart’s commercially-oriented hosting service, the risk was a little slower – business users were less susceptible to peer pressure and the newness of the platform – but the structural threat was real. If Microsoft chose to create a business-grade blogging product and integrate it with Office or Windows, Six Apart’s most profitable segment would be directly exposed.
The original analysis raised a broader concern: Google and Yahoo have moved aggressively into both content and community hosting. Google already bought Blogger. Yahoo was creating Yahoo 360. The era in which independent blogging companies could compete on equal terms with internet conglomerates was rapidly shrinking.
What actually happened
The predicted consolidation has arrived – just not in the expected form.
MSN Spaces continued to grow in the mid-2000s before rebranding as Windows Live Spaces. In 2010, Microsoft announced that it was shutting down Windows Live Spaces entirely and moving its users to WordPress.com – giving Automattic a significant user base instead of continuing to invest in the platform.
Six Apart’s trajectory was more complicated. In December 2007, Six Apart sold LiveJournal to SUP Fabrik, which had licensed the LiveJournal brand in Russia, losing the teen magazine market directly threatened by MSN Spaces. The sale allowed Six Apart to refocus on TypePad and Movable Type — but it also signaled a company that was pulling back rather than expanding.
In 2010, VideoEgg acquired Six Apart and renamed it SAY Media. He later sold Movable Type and the Six Apart name to Infocom, a Japanese IT company, while retaining TypePad. The house built by Ben and Mena Trott was dismantled and distributed to different owners on different continents. Those who thought Yahoo would make moves to acquire Six Apart were looking in the right direction, but they didn’t anticipate how fragmented the result would be.
A lesson that still applies
The specific players in this story—MSN Spaces, TypePad, LiveJournal—are either gone or unrecognized. But the underlying dynamic they describe has never been more relevant.
Platform dependency remains a defining strategic risk for independent content publishers. When a major platform decides to move into your space—whether through acquisition, integration, or the sheer weight of existing distribution—the rules of the game immediately change. What made a standalone product valuable yesterday (custom tools, community, focus) may be insufficient tomorrow when giants offer something good enough at zero marginal cost with services people already use every day.
The modern parallel writes itself. WordPress.com, Ghost, Substack, and Beehiiv all build sustainable independent platforms. Each faces a version of the same question that Six Apart faced in 2005: What happens when Google, Meta, or some future aggregator decides that newsletters, subscription content, or creative tools are worth owning?
The answer has historically not been reassuring for incumbents. The scale reaches. Distribution eats product quality. Integration—whether it’s a blogging tool built into a messenger, a newsletter product built into an email client, or an AI assistant built into a browser—tends to win out over convenience rather than advantage.
What should bloggers and creators take away from this?
The original 2005 analysis closed on a note about diversity – fearing reduced competition means a less interesting blogosphere. This fear was largely justified. Consolidation accelerated dramatically in the years following the rise of MSN Spaces. Blogger stopped under Google. LiveJournal has become a Russian-owned platform with a dramatically different character. TypePad has finally faded. WordPress has absorbed most of the rest and continues to do so.
What history teaches is concreteness, not pessimism. Build audience relationships that are completely independent of any platform’s ongoing goodwill. Understand that the tools you publish are not neutral infrastructure – they carry their own business interests, ownership structures, and viability pressures.
The bloggers who navigated the consolidation period most successfully were those who approached platform choice as a strategic decision rather than a default. That instinct is even more important now that platforms are bigger, integrations are deeper, and the pace of change is faster than we expected when we first watched MSN Spaces pass seven million blogs in one spring.
