Typepad

Where the BBC and Time blogged, deleted after 22 years

Shut down
19902026

Typepad was the professional blogging platform of the mid 2000s. MSNBC, Time, Wired, ABC, the CBC, the BBC and Sky News all ran blogs on it. It stopped accepting new users in 2020, and in August 2025 gave the remaining ones a month to export everything before deleting it.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2003
  2. October 2003 Launch
    Typepad launches

    Six Apart puts Movable Type's engine behind a service anyone can use.

  3. 2005
  4. 2005 Peak
    The press moves in

    Time, Wired, MSNBC, ABC, the CBC, the BBC and Sky News run blogs on it.

  5. 2010
  6. September 2010 merger
    Six Apart becomes SAY Media

    A merger with the advertising company VideoEgg.

  7. 2020
  8. December 2020 Decline
    New signups close

    Arrivals are pointed at Bluehost instead. The platform is now maintenance only.

  9. 2025
  10. 27 August 2025 Shutdown announced
    One month's notice

    All accounts, blogs and content will be permanently deleted on 30 September.

  11. 30 September 2025 Shutdown
    Typepad is deleted

    22 years of writing, gone from the servers.

The site through time

Browse typepad.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2003 2007 2011 2015 2019 2023 2025 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Six Apart 2003–2010 Founded Built Typepad on the Movable Type engine
SAY Media 2010–2014 Merger Six Apart merged with the advertising company VideoEgg
Endurance International Group 2014–2025 Acquisition Hosting conglomerate; new signups were redirected to its Bluehost brand

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Announced on 27 August 2025 that the service would close on 30 September, giving users about a month to export before accounts, blogs and all content were permanently deleted.

Our analysis: Typepad stopped taking new signups at the end of 2020 and spent five years serving only the people who had never left. A hosting company inherited it through two acquisitions and eventually decided that maintaining a 22 year old blogging platform for a shrinking base was not worth it.

History [edit]

Blogging for people who were not programmers

Six Apart launched Typepad in October 2003, built on the same engine as Movable Type but aimed at everyone Movable Type frightened off. No server to install, no Perl, no file permissions. You paid a subscription, picked a template, and wrote.

That combination made it the default for professional publishing. Time, Wired, MSNBC, ABC, the CBC, the BBC and Sky News all ran blogs on Typepad, alongside a large paying base of individual writers. For several years, if a media organisation wanted a blog and did not want to build one, this is what they used.

Two owners and a slow fade

WordPress ate the ground underneath it, first as software you installed yourself and then as WordPress.com. Six Apart merged with the advertising company VideoEgg in 2010 to become SAY Media, and Typepad was later sold on again to Endurance International Group, a hosting conglomerate.

By the end of 2020 Typepad had stopped accepting new signups altogether. Anyone arriving at the site was pointed at Bluehost, another Endurance brand. From that point it was in maintenance: a platform with no future customers, kept alive for the people already on it.

A month's notice

On 27 August 2025 the company announced that Typepad would shut down on 30 September. Accounts, blogs and all user content would be permanently deleted on that date. That left roughly one month to export 22 years of writing, using an export format built for Movable Type that WordPress can still import.

Some of what was on Typepad has been preserved by people who moved in time. The rest went with the servers.

The domain today

typepad.com now serves a domain sales page from Network Solutions. Nothing of the platform remains at the address.

Similar projects

App.net Users paid for it, and it still was not enough 2012–2017 Vox Closed at 3:20 in the afternoon, and its name sold on 2006–2010 Windows Live Spaces 30 million blogs, and Microsoft expected 1% to move 2004–2011 Open Diary Invented the comment, in 1998 1998–2014 Posterous Blogging by sending an email, bought and switched off 2008–2013 Jaiku A month older than Twitter, bought by Google, shelved 2006–2012

Sources [edit]

  1. Typepad is shutting down Typepad (Everything Typepad blog) 27 August 2025 [archived]
  2. Typepad Blogging Platform to Shut Down in September 2025 WebProNews 28 August 2025 [archived]

Last verified: 13 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).