I’ve talked to a few people recently who had a WordPress.com blog who left WordPress.com. One left because he wanted more customization features, so he bought some space on a hosted server and installed the free full version of WordPress, moving up in the world of WordPress. This is good because it means you got a taste of how powerful WordPress is, and now you can get your fingers into the power yourself and customize and tweak it to your own needs.
Another left because he realized that he had too many blogs and the work to keep up with all of them was just too much. Since he needed income from advertising, he narrowed his blogs down to those which provide income. While WordPress.com was too much fun, he said, it was also addictive. He kept reading the WordPress.com Dashboard from the Administration Panels to find out who the top blogs were and what new posts had been posted, checking out the new blogs too frequently. “I was just too distracted all the time. But it is so much fun to be a part of a community of bloggers, I just wanted to know what was going on.”
A young woman had a similar complaint. “Not only is there the fun of blogging which WordPress makes so easy, being a part of a community implied a sense of responsibility.” She felt that she had to keep track of what others were saying within the WordPress.com community, as well as the WordPress Community at large. After a month of inner debate, she choose to keep her WordPress.com blog, but to discipline her time and schedule more.
A lot of people quit blogging on WordPress.com, or any blogging service, once the shine has rubbed off and the thrill of newness is gone. This is just the way of the world.
I talk a lot about why people should blog and how to keep up your interest and enthusiasm, but it is also important to understand why people change blogging services or stop blogging all together. In particular, I’m interested in why you left WordPress.com.
So why did you leave? Did you want to move on to something bigger and better? What was that? Or were there other reasons? Tell us what they are so we can all understand why someone would want to leave. And maybe that will help us understand why we stay.
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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen
Lorelle on WordPress 
9 Comments
Hey that happened same with me. I left it because I want a blog that could give me some earnings. So I shifted from http://dumb.wordpress.com/ to http://www.exguides.org/blog/
And Its much better now for me.
I know of 4 people who moved from wordpress.com.
2 of them moved to individual hosting using wordpress because of lack of customization here. Third one moved to TypePad for which he did not gave any reason and the fourth one got bored of blogging per se.
Lack of flexibility to add plug-ins, not enough themes to choose from, but most of all I had too many blogs and it was easier to condense everything into one blog I had total control over.
I want to make sure that people read Aarggh, WordPress.com users READ THIS!! by Cornell of Ubuntu – the Newbie’s Blog. It is wonderful!
Thanks, Cornell.
Just wanna ask , why is it that when post somethinq , the post can’t be found or somethinq ? & when my I added new categories , all categories showed 0 even when I categorised my posts under them . It’s all not updated . I seemed to just can’t post anythinq . =(
Bustedsoul: I don’t know which version of WordPress you are working on. This article pertains to WordPress.com.
If you can’t find your posts, are you using the Publish button or Save? Did you install WordPress yourself? There might have been a problem.
If you are having trouble with the full version of WordPress, you can find help on the WordPress Support Forums. If you are having trouble with the free version of WordPress.com, then help is found on the WordPress.com Forums.
Left becuase i honestly think that wordpress.com is being selfish and unfair. Bloggers are the ones who build the WordPress.com community and WordPress.com is benefiting so much from its bloggers. Why not reward their bloggers by letting them benefit from being a member of this community? Why not let the bloggers write about sponsored posts. Why not let bloggers display ads? If they fear that splogs would swarm their site, they could at least develop some sort of rules to avoid this.
@Vienna:
Why not let WordPress.com bloggers display ads? For a variety of reasons, the most important one for me is that not all blogs nor bloggers need ads. If you want ads on your blog, pay for self-hosting out of the income you make blogging.
The real reason, though, is that WordPress.com bloggers, the community you refer to, voted to NOT have ads. They like having an ad-free blogging community. They voted, WordPress.com listened. Still, enough of the minority who want to blog for free and make money from the process will get rewarded as WordPress.com is slowly working on a way to get you to pay to make money with your blog. Details coming soon.
As for why bloggers can’t write “about” sponsored posts, they can. They just can’t get paid for writing sponsored posts, again, because the majority of WordPress.com bloggers said that’s not okay, and being paid to blog about things you know nothing about is a little unethical. Isn’t it?
There are rules in place to avoid and prevent splogs here, and they still get through. It’s a full time job to stop splogs and abuse. That’s still not the reason why.
Before laying blame, please always check the facts on the ground and read the rules and FAQs. Never assume. It makes you a better blogger and gains you respect.
I use WP on my self-hosted blog and think it’s the bees knees. I don’t think that I could use WordPress.com because of the limitations concerning plugins and themes (I love to play with plugins and new themes- which means I usually break my site, which is actually fun for me). I have a WP.com account, but that’s just for Akismet API. I think that WP.com is right to keep ads and sponsored posts off the site. If someone wants to do something like that it cost $6 a month to do it from their own domain.
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