Blogging Elements

Blogging as a Business: How Vulnerable Is Blogging?

Posted on 07. Feb, 2010 by Ashwin in Blogging

It was crazy last week as we struggled with the fact that paypal suddenly pulled the plug out and stopped all personal payments made to or from Indian paypal account holders — many of whom work for us in various capacities as freelancers. This is a huge blow for us because providers don’t work if we don’t make prompt payments and most of our work came to  a grinding halt. That just made me think over the weekend: how vulnerable are we as online business owners and bloggers? I just realized how dependent we are on paypal that we didn’t even bother to look for alternatives. Look at it this way, what would happen if the following happens:

Google Stops Adsense or Adwords or both: Unlikely to happen because these programs happen to be the bread winners for Google. However, things just don’t seem to be right anymore. Too many spammy sites are put up each day and thatis literally polluting the Internet. For this reason, Google might at least slap fines, pull plugs, ban a few countries ( It happened to China I guess? I am not much into depressing news, really!). Can you imagine the impact this can have on the web worker community as a whole. I think it would be nothing short of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki equivalent online.

Paypal goes on a banning spree: I heard that paypal is notorious for doing whatever it wants. It randomly freezes accounts, always seems to support the scammers and fraudsters at the expense of the innocent, hard-working and truthful merchants doing business legitimately on the web. Look at what they just did to those poor Indian merchants and service providers. Paypal seems to care less about customer service and the other paranoia inducing elements usually help businesses be on their toes because apparently,they seem to be a monopoly when it comes online cash transfers and other such transactions. Will paypal play russian roulette with the Internet?

Blogging isn’t free: What if blogging is not free anymore? What if they start charging for blogger.com and wordpress.com. Well, this one doesn’t worry me because I’ve never been a fan of free blogs ( except for marketing purposes). I don’t care much if they remove the ‘free’option completely. The self-hosting blogging options will be the only one left  and that’s good because even though you pay for domain and hosting services, you will end up having more freedom and earn more money that way.

Do you think blogging is vulnerable and subjected to a few companies/establishments that seem to wield a lot of power over the small online business owner? What do you think we can do to counter this, if it can be countered at all?

Tags: blogger.com, Blogging, Google, Google adsense, Google Adwords, online business, paypal, vulnerable