Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of Blog Herald’s editorial archive. Originally published in 2005, it has been reviewed and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In December 2004, Microsoft launched MSN Spaces — a free, stripped-down blogging tool baked directly into the MSN Messenger ecosystem. Within five months, it had accumulated over seven million blogs. Within a year, it was the largest blogging platform on the internet by volume.
For most observers, this looked like a success story. For Six Apart — the company behind Movable Type, TypePad, and LiveJournal — it looked like something else entirely: a warning.
A 2005 analysis of MSN Spaces’ early growth raised a question that the blogging world wasn’t quite ready to ask. What happens when a platform giant decides your market is worth owning?
The MSN Spaces playbook
Microsoft’s entry into blogging wasn’t accidental. MSN Messenger had an estimated 150 million users worldwide at the time of Spaces’ launch. Integrating blogging directly into that ecosystem gave the platform a distribution advantage that no independent blogging company could realistically match. Spaces didn’t need to be better. It just needed to be there, already open, already connected to where hundreds of millions of people already spent their time.
The growth numbers reflected this. In its first month, Bill Gates claimed Spaces had reached one million users. By April 2005, reports indicated more than seven million blogs had been created, growing at roughly 100,000 per day. The platform was on track to reach ten million blogs before the middle of May — a scale that would make it the largest English-language blogging service in the world.
For Six Apart, the most acute threat was to LiveJournal, which it had acquired just months earlier in January 2005. LiveJournal’s audience was overwhelmingly young — teenagers and early twenty-somethings — precisely the demographic most attracted to Spaces through their existing Messenger habits. LiveJournal had grown to over 14 million accounts by the time Six Apart eventually sold it, but active engagement told a different story. During the months of MSN Spaces’ explosive growth, LiveJournal’s active user count was barely moving even as registrations climbed.
The Netscape problem
The 2005 analysis invoked Netscape for a reason. Microsoft had dismantled a dominant browser not through superior engineering but through integration — bundling Internet Explorer with Windows until the market simply stopped looking elsewhere. The concern for Six Apart was that the same logic applied to blogging.
Microsoft does not typically enter markets to compete. It enters to consolidate. And with Spaces embedded in a messaging platform touching hundreds of millions of users, the consolidation mechanism was already in place. For TypePad, Six Apart’s commercially oriented hosted service, the risk was somewhat slower-moving — business users were less susceptible to peer pressure and platform novelty — but the structural threat was real. If Microsoft chose to build 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 also flagged a broader concern: Google and Yahoo were both moving aggressively into content and community hosting. Google had already acquired Blogger. Yahoo was building out Yahoo 360. The era when independent blogging companies could compete on equal terms with internet conglomerates was narrowing fast.
What actually happened
The predicted consolidation did come — just not in the form that was anticipated.
MSN Spaces continued to grow through the mid-2000s before rebranding as Windows Live Spaces. In 2010, Microsoft announced it was shutting down Windows Live Spaces entirely and migrating its users to WordPress.com — effectively handing Automattic a significant user base rather than continuing to invest in the platform.
Six Apart’s trajectory was more complicated. In December 2007, Six Apart sold LiveJournal to SUP Fabrik, a Russian media company that had already licensed the LiveJournal brand for use in Russia, shedding the teen journal market that MSN Spaces had most directly threatened. The sale allowed Six Apart to refocus on TypePad and Movable Type — but it also signaled a company in retreat rather than expansion.
In 2010, VideoEgg acquired Six Apart and renamed itself SAY Media. It subsequently sold Movable Type and the Six Apart name to Infocom, a Japanese IT company, while retaining TypePad. The house that Ben and Mena Trott built had been dismantled and distributed across different owners on different continents. Those who thought Yahoo might be making steps in acquiring Six Apart were looking in the right direction, but underestimated how fragmented the outcome would become.
The lesson that still applies
The specific players in this story — MSN Spaces, TypePad, LiveJournal — are either gone or unrecognizable. But the underlying dynamic they illustrated has never been more relevant.
Platform dependency remains the defining strategic risk for independent content publishers. When a large platform decides to move into your space — whether through acquisition, integration, or the sheer weight of its existing distribution — the rules of the game change immediately. What made an independent product valuable yesterday (dedicated tooling, community, focus) can become insufficient tomorrow when a giant offers something good enough at zero marginal cost, bundled with services people already use daily.
The modern parallel writes itself. WordPress.com, Ghost, Substack, and Beehiiv are all building sustainable independent platforms. Each faces a version of the same question Six Apart faced in 2005: what happens when Google, Meta, or some future aggregator decides that newsletters, subscription content, or creator tools are worth owning?
The answer, historically, has not been reassuring for incumbents. Scale eats reach. Distribution eats product quality. And integration — whether it’s a blogging tool embedded in a messenger, a newsletter product built into an email client, or an AI assistant bundled into a browser — tends to win through convenience rather than merit.
What bloggers and creators should take from this
The original 2005 analysis closed with a note about diversity — the fear that reduced competition would mean a less interesting blogosphere. That fear was largely justified. The years following MSN Spaces’ rise saw consolidation accelerate dramatically. Blogger stagnated under Google. LiveJournal became a Russian-owned platform with a dramatically different character. TypePad eventually faded. WordPress absorbed much of what remained, and continues to do so.
What that history teaches is not pessimism but specificity. Build audience relationships that don’t depend entirely on any single platform’s continued goodwill. Understand that the tools you publish with are not neutral infrastructure — they carry business interests, ownership structures, and survival pressures of their own.
The bloggers who navigated the consolidation era most successfully were those who treated platform choice as a strategic decision rather than a default. That instinct is even more important now, when the platforms are larger, the integrations are deeper, and the speed of change is faster than anything we could have anticipated when he first watched MSN Spaces cross seven million blogs in a single spring.
