Last week Yandex announced to its Russian users that it will stop supporting its blog hosting service Ya.ru “by the end of this summer.”
“About 0.3% of the journals opened on the service are now updated once a month. On average, just 1500 comments are added in a day,” the Russian search giant explained. “Obviously, the majority of people prefer to write and communicate in social networks on other platforms. In this situation, it becomes complicated and inexpedient to support Ya.ru. Therefore, we have decided to close it.”
Access will be lost to all blogs and clubs, but Ya.ru users will have the chance to transfer all their entries to LiveJournal.
Ya.ru was opened in April 2007. In 2009, the service was one of the four largest blog hosters on the Runet, along with LiveJournal, Blogs.Mail.ru and LiveInternet. Then the popularity of Ya.ru began to decline, along with the popularity of blogging in general and the growth of social networks. Development was discontinued and the service effectively stood still.
For similar reasons, in early 2013, Yandex handed over its ‘Narod’ website hosting activities to website builder and hoster uCoz.
