History of Blogger (1999): founders, timeline, facts

A tool for publishing web pages instantly, grown out of a side internal tool at a company that was building something else entirely: Pyra, a web-based task and project manager. Between 1999 and 2003 it went from a free form with automatic FTP publishing to a service with a million users, surviving the departure of the whole team and 2001, when two people ran the service, and it was bought by Google in 2003.

In brief

Blogger began as a side tool inside Pyra, a web application for tasks and projects that the company had raised money for. The Pyra application stayed in the shadows, while the free publishing tool reached 150,000 registered users by April 2001. In December 2000 Pyra ran out of money and the staff was formally laid off, and at the end of January 2001 the team broke up; for most of 2001 the service was run by Evan Williams and Jason Shellen, with no money and no other people. What saved the company was not a sale but a license: Trellix paid an undisclosed sum for Blogger's technology in March 2001. The paid Blogger Pro appeared at the end of January 2002, two and a half years after launch. In February 2003 Google bought Pyra; the price was not disclosed, and Williams and five or six other people moved to Google estimate.

How it started (the founders)

Williams and Meg Hourihan founded Pyra Labs in San Francisco in January 1999; the primary source does not name the exact day. The investors were O'Reilly & Associates, Advance Publications, Jerry Michalski, and The Accelerator Group; Wired describes them as three private angels and two publishers, O'Reilly and Condé Nast.

The first product was not a blogging platform. In October 1999 Pyra's site described it as a web tool for managing tasks and related information in a shared, accessible space. The blogging tool grew out of the team's internal needs while Pyra was in beta; the main code was written by Paul Bausch and Matt Haughey. The public launch was August 23, 1999 fact, according to two independent secondary sources; Williams and Bricklin themselves say late August 1999.

At the start Blogger was a free form on the site with a button for saving to the server, which uploaded the page over FTP to the user's own hosting; at the bottom was a "Powered by Pyra" badge. Hourihan recalled that the idea was modest: to make life a little easier for people who already knew how to do it.

Year-by-year timeline

1999-01: Williams and Hourihan founded Pyra Labs fact
1999 (April–May): Peter Merholz proposed in the sidebar of his site saying "blog" instead of "weblog"; by his own account, he does not remember the day fact
1999-08-23: the launch of Blogger as a free Pyra product fact
2000 (fall): BlogSpot, hosting for people without a server of their own; a year after Blogger launched, according to Williams estimate
2000-12: Pyra ran out of money and the staff was formally laid off, but people kept working with no guarantee of pay fact
2001-01-02: Pyra opened a donation drive for a server; about 86,000 users fact
2001-01-31: Williams published "And Then There Was One": merger talks had fallen through, and Hourihan, Bausch, Haughey, and two others no longer worked at Pyra fact
2001-02-13: a dinner between Williams and Dan Bricklin of Trellix; the outline of the deal was agreed within two days fact
2001-03-02: the deal was signed and the money transferred fact
2001-04-16: Trellix announced a license to Blogger's technology; the service had 150,000 registered users fact
2002-01-25: the launch of Blogger Pro: it was being discussed on MetaFilter that day, priced at $35; the sales page in August: $35 a year as the introductory price, $50 as the planned price
2002-08: Pro and ad-free BlogSpot were Pyra's main source of income; a Brazilian version on Globo.com, 16,000 users in a week fact
2003-02-13: Google bought Pyra Labs; the Guardian names Saturday, February 15, as the day of the deal
2003-02-15…18: the news reached the press and Williams confirmed it; more than a million registered users, about 200,000 active blogs; Williams and five or six people moved to Google estimate

Lesser-known but significant facts

The deal that saved Blogger was agreed over dinner at a sushi bar. Bricklin read Williams's essay on February 1, 2001, and offered his help; they met in San Francisco on February 13 and had dinner at Niko Niko Sushi (the bill was $41.10 plus $8.50 in tip). On February 15 Williams received a draft of the terms by mail, and on March 2 the deal was signed and the money changed hands.
Trellix ultimately did not use Blogger's code. The architectures did not match, and Trellix built its blogging feature from scratch, using Blogger as a model.
The users paid for the server. On January 2, 2001, Pyra opened a drive for $5–10 donations toward a new server: within a few hours 191 people had sent $3,200, including $25 from a competitor, Dave Winer. Williams told Wired that it had become impossible to get money from investors in the current climate.
A paid plan was being considered almost a year before Pro launched. By Williams's account, in January and February 2001 he thought about switching to a paid model, but he was not ready for it, either in the quality of the service or psychologically. Pro came out at the end of January 2002.
Bloggers updated about 30 times more often than ordinary sites. According to the press release and Williams's essay, Blogger users updated their blogs an average of 2.2 times a day, while ordinary sites built with Trellix were updated 2.2 times a month.

Legend vs. the record

Legend: Blogger coined the word "blog." The record: Merholz himself writes that sometime in April or May 1999 he made a joking entry in his sidebar about pronouncing "weblog" as "wee'-blog," or "blog" for short. Blogger came out in August 1999, that is, later. Merholz adds that the word would most likely have died in obscurity if Pyra Labs had not released Blogger and the word had not spread along with the tool's success. A reader writes in a comment that they noted the word on May 23, 1999 estimate; a snapshot of Merholz's site from May 4, 1999, does not contain the phrase. Verdict: the word was coined not by Blogger but by Merholz, no later than the spring of 1999; Blogger made it mainstream.
Legend: Google bought Blogger for the advertising. The record: Google's statement speaks of synergies and future opportunities for the two companies; advertising is not mentioned at all in Google's statement, in the Information Today piece, or in Fleishman's short 2003 reaction, which ties the purchase to Google's interest in content creation. A contemporary commentator only suggested an interest in human selection of content estimate. Neither the amount nor the form of payment was disclosed; Internet News writes of cash estimate. Verdict: documents of the period do not name Google's motive; the advertising version is neither confirmed nor refuted by the source material unverified.
Legend: Blogger was for everyone from day one. The record: before BlogSpot a user needed their own web hosting and FTP; Hourihan says that at first it was a way to make the work a little easier for people who already knew how to publish. Only BlogSpot, in the fall of 2000, took hosting on itself, and by April 2001, according to Williams, more than half of new blogs were being created there. Verdict: Blogger became mass-market a year after launch, not on the day it started.

The first growth lever

Growth rested on two steps. The first was the form and FTP: a page could be published without HTML and for free, and every site carried a "this web site is powered by Blogger" badge with a link to blogger.com, including Williams's own site. The second was BlogSpot, which removed the hosting barrier.

The number of registered users grew in steps: about 65,000 in early November 2000 and 86,000 in January 2001, on the back of coverage in Wired and the New Yorker, according to Wired; 150,000 in April 2001; more than a million in February 2003, with about 200,000 active blogs among them.

This growth brought in no money: over two and a half years of being free, the source material records only the $3,200 in donations, the Trellix license for an undisclosed sum, and then Pro. Low costs helped it survive: in January 2001 Williams wrote that his expenses were relatively small and that the server capacity would be enough for a while.

The paired story

GeoCities (per the lead dossier of the pair) and Pyra Labs were two companies whose sites were made by the users themselves. Both were eventually bought by giants: Yahoo in 1999, Google in 2003.

The unit of product. GeoCities settled a person on a page in a themed "neighborhood"; Blogger gave them a feed of posts on their own hosting, and later on BlogSpot.
Where the money came from. According to the GeoCities dossier, it took in $18.4 million in revenue for 1998, about 90% of it from advertising, with an accumulated deficit of $32.2 million, and went public in August 1998. Pyra has no revenue in the source material before 2001: $3,200 in donations in January, the Trellix license in March, and the paid Pro in 2002 at $35.
The sale price. Yahoo paid in stock worth about $3.6 billion on the day of the announcement estimate (per the GeoCities dossier). Google's price was not disclosed; Williams and five or six people moved to Google estimate.
The outcome. Yahoo shut down GeoCities in the US in October 2009, ten years after the purchase. Blogger kept working after the purchase, and, according to the GeoCities dossier, was still running in 2018, when Google updated it. Why their fates diverged, the source material does not say unverified.
Careful with the comparison. GeoCities homesteaders (3.2 million) and Blogger's registered users are counted differently.

Parallels today (projects from the catalog)

Get Map Leads (get-map-leads) — the same move as Pyra's: an agency's internal tool became a separate product. Pyra's side tool came out in August 1999, while Pyra itself was still in beta; at Get Map Leads, according to the description in its dossier, it took 20 days to go from internal tool to first version. view this project's dossier →
OmegleWeb (omegleweb) — a free site that lived on banners and donations for more than two years and only in 2026 quietly added a paid subscription. Pyra likewise collected donations for a server and introduced a paid plan only in its third year. The difference: OmegleWeb took the place of a closed competitor, while Pyra was among the first in a new genre and competed with Pitas and Edit This Page. view this project's dossier →
Marble (marble-cms) — a builder of a backend for a blog: an editor and an API instead of a heavy CMS. A late descendant of the problem Blogger solved in 1999; at Marble, content can be managed by an AI agent through MCP. view this project's dossier →

What a builder can take from this in 2026

You build one product, and a different one takes off. Pyra's main product in 1999 was a task manager, but its fame came from a side publishing tool.
A "powered by" badge works as a free channel. Every site on Blogger carried a link back to the service.
A free entry point has to be finished all the way. For its first year the free Blogger required your own hosting; it became mass-market after BlogSpot.
Two and a half years without a paid option is fragility. From August 1999 to January 2002 Pyra took no money from users apart from voluntary donations; when investors said no, it had to ask for money for a server, and what saved it was the Trellix license that Bricklin proposed.
A product that is cheap to run survives the team leaving. In 2001 the service, with BlogSpot and 150,000 users, was run by two people; Williams himself explained that he could keep going because the costs were small and there were enough servers.

Discrepancies and what we could not verify

The founding date. January 1999 comes from Williams's own words; January 1 appears only in sources derived from Wikipedia estimate.
The BlogSpot date. Two secondary sources that trace back to a single book by Scott Rosenberg put it in late 1999. Williams writes in the primary essay that it came a year after Blogger launched; the dossier uses the fall of 2000.
How long the service ran without the team. Williams's essay of January 31, 2001: "Just me"; Shellen: for most of 2001 there were two of them; the Guardian: Williams ran the service from home until 2002; in August 2002 Williams writes that at the start of that year he was the only person at the company. The claim that he ran it alone for more than a year is not supported by primary sources and has been removed.
The arithmetic of the dates. From the formal layoff in December 2000 to the Trellix money on March 2, 2001: three months; from the team's departure on January 31: one month. To Pro (2002-01-25): two years and five months from the launch of Blogger, about a year from Williams's thoughts about a paid model (January–February 2001), and less than eleven months from the Trellix money.
The date of the Google purchase. Information Today and Williams's chronology: February 13; the Guardian says it happened on a Saturday, that is, February 15. The dossier uses February 13; the news became public on February 15–18.
Blogger Pro became free after the purchase. Only a Wikipedia retelling; there is no primary document estimate.
The number who moved to Google. Information Today: a six-person company, with Williams taking five employees; the Guardian: Williams and six employees. The dossier uses five or six estimate.
The Pro launch date. There is no official announcement; 2002-01-25 comes from a MetaFilter post of that day; the dossier previously gave August 2002, based on a snapshot of the sales page.
Not obtained: Williams's post about the Google purchase and Gillmor's post of February 15, 2003.

Sources (primary first)

Primary (period documents and the participants' own words):

Secondary:

Glenn Fleishman — "Google Buys Pyra," 2003-02-15
Internet News — "Google Acquires Blog Software Firm," 2003
TNL.net — "Google goes blogging," 2003-02-17
Cybercultural — "1999: Blogs Burst Onto the Scene"
Wikipedia — Pyra Labs and Blogger (service)) — used only as pointers to primary sources

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