# Blogcu.com (2005 – 2020)

- URL: https://girisimcikafasi.com/en/startup-graveyard/blogcu-com/
- Sector: Social media
- Country: Turkey
- Total funding: unknown
- Cause of closure: Lost to competitors

## What did it do?

Blogcu.com was a platform founded by BerilTech in 2005 and known as Turkey's first blogging service. Users could open a blog for free, change its design and publish content. Nokta A.Ş. bought the site in 2007 and over the following years moved the platform first to a feed-based and then to an image-led format.

## Why did it shut down?

Under Nokta, Blogcu.com went through radical overhauls in 2009 and 2012. Writing about the 2012 change, Webrazzi said the platform had taken on a visual format, a mix of Tumblr and Pinterest, and that classic bloggers had been somewhat neglected. According to Turkish Wikipedia, the site went offline on 1 July 2020; there is no public statement about the closure. Internet Archive records also show that the site was not live after May 2020. Alkışlarla Yaşıyorum, another long-established Nokta site, closed in the same period; it is reasonable to think that the shift of blogging and content sharing to social networks played a part in the decision (interpretation).

## The story

Blogcu.com was founded by BerilTech in 2005 and became known as Turkey's first blogging service. Users could open a blog for free and change its design however they liked. The site quickly reached a large audience. In April 2007 the internet venture company Nokta A.Ş. added Blogcu.com to its portfolio. According to a report in Hürriyet at the time, the site had 375,000 members when it was bought and was Turkey's 16th most visited website. Nokta's portfolio then also included sites such as İzlesene, Fotokritik and Sinemalar.

Under Nokta, Blogcu was constantly being reshaped. In 2009 it was rebuilt from its design to its software, and a channels section was added in which content flowed by category. In 2012 came a more radical change. In Webrazzi's words, the platform took on a visual format, a mix of Tumblr and Pinterest; a button was introduced for quickly adding content from other sites, and comments were moved to a Facebook plug-in. The same article noted that text-focused classic bloggers had been somewhat neglected in the change.

Meanwhile, internet users' content-sharing habits were also changing. According to Turkish Wikipedia, Blogcu.com went offline on 1 July 2020. There is no public statement about the closure; Internet Archive records also show that the site was not live after May 2020. In the same month, Alkışlarla Yaşıyorum, another long-established Nokta site, had also ceased publication.

Blogcu.com's quiet closure is a small but telling example of how the first wave of user-generated content on the Turkish internet came to an end. For fifteen years, the diaries, poems and photos of hundreds of thousands of people had accumulated on this platform. Cutting off access without any announcement meant that a large share of that content also quietly disappeared.

## Lessons

- When shutting down a platform built on user content, leave a way to export the archive; trust depends on it.
- Every redesign that attracts a new audience can also drive away your loyal core users.
- Being the category leader does not protect you when the category itself is shrinking.

## Sources

- [Blogcu.com sold](https://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/blogcu-com-satildi-6346788)
- [Blogcu.com adapts to the visual web with radical changes](https://webrazzi.com/2012/01/30/blogcu-com-gorsel-web/)
- [Blogcu.com Completely Revamped and Now in Beta](https://webrazzi.com/2009/10/23/blogcu-com-tamamen-yenilendi-ve-su-anda-test-yayininda/)
- [Blogcu.com](https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogcu.com)