What happened to the blogs we built
Between 2007 and 2019, 95,743 people joined IndiBlogger. Every one of them gave us a web address when they signed up, and we still have that list. So in September 2026, we went back and checked.
Not all of them: 6,329 addresses, 250 for each join year and each kind of address. That's enough to see the pattern, and the pattern is pretty stark.
Paid sites vanished, free ones stayed
Of the addresses people paid for, their own domains, 52.5% no longer resolve at all. Type one in and you get nothing.
Of the free blogs on someone else's platform (Blogspot, WordPress.com and the like), registered by the same people in the same years, 0.5% are gone.
Age doesn't explain it either. An eight-year-old paid address is about as likely to be gone as a nineteen-year-old one. These sites didn't fade away slowly. Somebody stopped paying a renewal, and that was that.
Survived is a generous word
The free blogs are still there, but mostly as corpses. Among the ones that show a date, 85% haven't been touched in five years. The study puts it better than I can: "The free platform preserves the corpse."
So either way, most of us stopped writing. The paid sites died when someone stopped renewing. The free ones survived and went quiet. I don't think the writing was ever the problem. Keeping it going was. (I'm not throwing stones here - IndiBlogger itself runs on bare-bones staff these days.)
Keeping sites from lapsing is what I work on now, for small businesses, at InkySites.
The full study, with the method, confidence intervals and caveats, is here: Half the websites India's bloggers paid for are gone.
One more thing. Something new for writers is cooking. I'll say just one word about it: primal. Stay tuned.