VietNamNet Bridge – There is still a “powerful force of bloggers” in Vietnam, which means that the service still has great development potentials. However, service providers should integrate multimedia feature, such as music or video, or interaction features like social network, to their blog services, in order to attract more users.

Yahoo! ends its blog service in Vietnam

On January 17, Yahoo sent emails to members, informing that it will stop providing blog service and that users will not be able to log in Yahoo!Blog any more. Yahoo requests users to access to download.blog.yahoo.com to download and store personal data after receiving the notice and complete the work prior to March 9, 2013.

Prior to that, in December 2012, Yahoo announced on mass media its decision to stop Yahoo!Blog in Vietnam and maintain only two products here, namely Yahoo!Mail and Messenger.

By April 2012, Yahoo!360Plus had had 2.3 million members only, the number which was even lower then others’ blog service like Yume (2.4 million users), wordpress.com (2.9 million), blogspot.com (5.1 million).

Analysts have commented that the decision by Yahoo has put an end to its effort to develop blog service in Vietnam. Yahoo once tried to attract Vietnamese users by introducing a new blog foundation designed to replace Yahoo!360Plus three years after the debut. Even though the new service was integrated with many new features, it still could not attract Vietnamese users like it did with Yahoo!360 in 2009.

Right after Yahoo made the announcement, in December 2012, Vietnamese Zing launched Zing Blog service at blog.zing.vn, developed on the platform of the social network Zing Me, while providing users necessary tools to shift from Yahoo!Blog to Zing Blog.

With Zing Blog, users can share their entries on other social networks, from Zing Me to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or Linkhay, Digg, Linkedin to increase the connection and help spread out the blog content among the community.

Demand still very high

When asked if Zing Me takes a dangerous step when it decides to develop blog service even though Yahoo!Blog has to shut down, a senior executive of VNG, the owner of Zing Me, said writing on blogs has always been a habit of many Vietnamese people, which means that the demand has always been high.

In fact, developing Zing Blog has been defined as a part of VNG’s plan to develop the social network Zing Me. The blogger’s community has been developing very strongly on Zing Me with 500,000 entries and 2 million bloggers a month. Most of the users, about 42 percent. are aged from 18 to 25.

“This is really a big number and it is not venturous at all when we decided to persist in our development strategy,” the executive said.

According to Phan Anh Tuan, deputy director of VTC Online, the owner of Go.vn, the users are still very young, the demand for writing blogs is not really high. Therefore, Go.vn still does not think of strengthening blog service at this moment. However, he thinks that the members of other social networks like Facebookk and Zing Me seem to be a little older, therefore, the demand for blog services from the members of the social networks is higher.

Tuan, while admitting the high demand for blog service from bloggers’ community, said service providers should integrate multimedia features like music, or video or the services with high interaction level. Meanwhile, if they only have simple features such as text or images, they would be able to attract small numbers of users.

Buu Dien