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by on August 4, 2010

Posterous vs Blogger vs WordPress

Do take note that the self-hosted Word­Press is not included. That’s a totally dif­fer­ent type.

I’ve decided on 6 dif­fer­ent cri­te­ria for the basis of comparison.

1. Domain Mapping.

What’s domain map­ping? It’s hav­ing your own domain name mapped to the respec­tive plat­form. Instead of hav­ing http://yourblog.blogger.com it can be http://yourblog.com.

All three offers the func­tion. Do they offer free domain map­ping if you already reg­is­tered for one? Pos­ter­ous and Blog­ger does, unfor­tu­nately Word­Press doesn’t.

How much if you wanted your own domain name:

  • Pos­ter­ous
    1 year plan cost $24.99/year. They give you dis­counts up to 48% if you signed up for 10 years ($12.99/year).
    Addi­tional ID Theft Pro­tec­tion at $10.00/year.
  • Blog­ger
    Cost $10.00/year.
    Free­bies thrown in: Google Apps (email, cal­en­der, docs) pri­vate domain reg­is­tra­tion (like ID Theft Pro­tec­tion), full DNS con­trol and manege­ment, domain lock (so that no one can hijack your domain when its up for renewal),
  • WordPress.com
    Domain name reg­is­tra­tion + domain map­ping costs $14.97 per year, per domain.
    Addi­tional: Pri­vate Domain Reg­is­tra­tion at $8/year.
Winner: Blogger

2. Theme Sup­port and Customization.

Themes make your blogs stand out. A cus­tomize state­ment of your­self on the internet.

  • Pos­ter­ous
    There are only 18 themes for you to choose. You can cus­tomize the col­ors and head­ers. If you know CSS and HTML you can fur­ther cus­tomize the theme. There are not much sup­port for free themes on the net.
  • Blog­ger
    With the addi­tion of Tem­plate Designer recently, mak­ing your own themes are so much eas­ier. You can cus­tomize the tem­plate, back­ground, lay­out and advance con­trol of every­thing from col­ors to text size and fonts.

  • WordPress.com
    Lots of themes for you to choose from, though you can’t mod­ify any­thing unless there is an option in the theme. You can only use the themes found in WordPress.com only. So if you found a theme that you like, hope­fully it is also in Word­Press, if not tough luck.
Winner: Blogger

3. Wid­gets.

Wid­gets. Those lit­tle stuff that makes your blog look infor­ma­tive. Usu­ally it appears in a side­bar. It can be about any­thing, from your recent blog post to twit­ter updates to your affil­i­ates links.

  • Pos­ter­ous
    No abil­ity to put in any wid­gets. In fact the side­bar is pretty lim­ited. I had to code in the Ama­zon link into the theme. It was tedious to do so.
  • Blog­ger
  • WordPress.com

Winner: Blogger

4. Mon­e­ti­za­tion.

  • Pos­ter­ous
    No easy way to mon­e­tize the blog, unless you make your own links and hyper­link to your words in your post. Gets very tedious after awhile.
    Prob­a­bly that’s only way.
    And your need a link-cloaking on a self-hosted blog.
  • Blog­ger
  • WordPress.com
    The only way to run adver­tise­ment is to apply for Ad Con­trol. To begin with your site must gen­er­ate lots of traf­fic (gen­er­ally 25,000 pageviews/month or more) and the rev­enue is split 50/50 with WordPress.com or your a VIP blog (based on WordPress.com cri­te­ria).
Winner: Blogger

5. Mul­ti­me­dia in your Post.

If your posts are only about words, it can get bor­ing. You must also have the abil­ity to embed video, doc­u­ments or flash pre­sen­ta­tion in your blog easily.

  • Pos­ter­ous
    Han­dles most, if not all files thrown at it. From YouTube to Scribd to images, it for­mats it cor­rectly. Even mul­ti­ple images are auto­mat­i­cally put in a thumb­nail gallery. Mp3 files, no prob­lem, it can eas­ily play on site. The eas­i­est to include mul­ti­me­dia files.
  • Blog­ger
    Just as easy as Pos­ter­ous. Sup­ports lots of other files.
  • WordPress.com
    You can embed Youtube and Daily motion videos using short­codes. There is an option to embed your own video and host it on WordPress.com. It cost $59.97/year and you might need a space upgrade too at $49.97 for a 15GB space.
Winner: Posterous

6. Ease of Post­ing articles.

How easy it is to post your article.

  • Pos­ter­ous
     Do you know how to email? Then you know how to post. Write your post on an email and send it to Pos­ter­ous, its that easy. And if you set up Auto­post to var­i­ous social net­works like Twit­ter, Linkedin, Face­book and lots of oth­ers, all of them gets updated as well.
    Of course, they have their own built in edi­tor for you to write you article.
  • Blog­ger
    Can Blog­ger post be email? Yes it can, though it can’t eas­ily update your social net­works. For that you have to rely on third-party solu­tions. Updates to Face­book via Net­worked­Blogs. Thank­fully most social sites can include you blog RSS feed, so updat­ing is not really an issue.
  • WordPress.com
    Sim­i­larly for WordPress.com you can post by email, and rely on third-party solu­tions to update your var­i­ous social sites. They have a unique fea­ture of audio post­ing.

Winner: Posterous

The ver­dict.

  1. Blog­ger.
  2. Pos­ter­ous.
  3. Word­Press.

Blog­ger wins sim­ply because it can eas­ily mon­e­tize your blog, have lots of online sup­port from the com­mu­nity and great theme support.

If you think that mon­e­ti­za­tion of your blog is wrong, then don’t sign up for it. Who knows, maybe later you change your mind and its great to know that Blog­ger eas­ily sup­ports it.

For Pos­ter­ous to over­come Blog­ger, all they need to do is have more theme sup­port and allows easy mon­e­ti­za­tion of the blog. And not have some blog­ger rant­ing on why they switch to Posterous.

Who knows, maybe after they reach the crit­i­cal mass, there will be a paid option for extras like in WordPress.com. Its too early to tell with Posterous.

Pos­ter­ous wins over Word­Press sim­ply because of its abil­ity to freely embed videos and any other files we throw at it. Unlike WordPress.com, you need to use a short­code and not all files can be embedded.

Pos­ter­ous auto­post abil­ity is also a unique feature.

The only unique thing about WordPress.com is the abil­ity to do phone-in audio post.

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  • Par­adis­e­Mobi

    Pos­ter­ous could be great but there are sev­eral seri­ous prob­lems that are still ongo­ing. I under­stand they are still fairly new (what, 3 years now?), so maybe they will even­tu­ally get their act together, but it def­i­nitely is still not a good heavy-weight platform…

    1. Because their blogs are “email spe­cific” rather than “blog name spe­cific” (as most other blog plat­forms are), if you have sev­eral blogs & you add all your email addys to all of your blogs (so you can email to any of your blogs from any of your email addys), their sys­tem can­not han­dle it but will send your emails criss-crossing all over the place to all the wrong blogs. Total dis­as­ter. I wasted the last quar­ter of 2009 try­ing to make it work & it just wouldn’t. I finally deleted all email addys from all blogs & only re-entered a few sep­a­rate emails for each blogs (which means I have to go “approve” posts from cer­tain addys first before they will post. A real pain). As far as I am con­cerned, they built Pos­ter­ous wrong from the ground up. The foun­da­tion is wrong. Blogs should be blog-site spe­cific vs. email specific.

    2. If you are a seri­ous email-blogger (vs. web post­ing), the major flaws still ongo­ing are:
    a. You can only send originally-typed con­tent in emails if you want to be 100% sure they show up.
    b. You can­not include in your emails any copied/cut/pasted snips or quotes or para­graphs, etc. that you copied from:
    b1. Word docs,
    b2. Notes apps,
    b3. Web­sites, arti­cles, etc.
    b4. “For­warded” emails, newslet­ters, etc.
    b5. Arrows in your email,
    b6. Brack­ets around quoted text, etc.
    If you include any of the above in your email, you may end up with a headline-only post with all body con­tent miss­ing, or with big chunks miss­ing, etc.

    Pos­ter­ous’ offi­cial answer to this prob­lem is to only type orig­i­nal text in your email! Sorry, but that doesn’t work for the type of blogging/sharing that I do. :-/

    The prob­lem has grown worse since Spring of 2010. Emails with assorted exter­nal con­tent copied/pasted into emails pre­vi­ously posted cor­rectly. I do not know what changed but I’ve got dozens of aborted dis­as­ter headline-only posts across my sev­eral blogs over the past few months. Very frustrating.

    Their expla­na­tion is that their sys­tem can­not as yet han­dle:
    1. Dif­fer­ences in For­mat­ting;
    2. Text Conversions.

    Yet strangely enough, the anti­quated Yahoogroups (which I have used since 2001 for email groups), has no prob­lem post­ing copies of the very same emails that I also send to Pos­ter­ous blogs. Yahoogroups has no prob­lems with “Dif­fer­ences in For­mat­ting” nor “Text Con­ver­sions” with what­ever you include in your emails. So why does the “newer, bet­ter, mod­ern” Pos­ter­ous have such a problem?

    What does Pos­ter­ous need to be able to han­dle any type of emailed con­tent? (Not being a techie, I have no idea.) What­ever it is, I hope they get it soon. I have put a year’s worth of effort into email-blogging there & it seems to get worse, not better.

    Bot­tom Line: It depends on your style (email blog­ger? Or web­site blog­ger?) & what the con­tent of your emails will be (orig­i­nally typed con­tent only? Or exter­nal con­tent included?) & whether you want one blog or sev­eral with the same email addys reg­is­tered with all blogs, etc.

  • Par­adis­e­Mobi

    I had also set up a blog at Blog­ger & had high hopes about it. Unfor­tu­nately, emails to blog­ger with pho­tos, graph­ics, etc. included, 9 times out of 10, at the blog­ger end all that shows up are those “lit­tle blue boxes with ?” where your pho­tos should be.

    Search­ing the blog­ger help com­mu­nity & google searches showed other peo­ple have been com­plain­ing about the same prob­lem for sev­eral years with no solu­tion provided.

    So then I added autopost-to-blogger via pos­ter­ous blog. That solved the “lit­tle blue boxes” at blog­ger since the email goes thru the pos­ter­ous sys­tem first.

    BUT THEN when pos­ter­ous began hav­ing all their “Dif­fer­ences in For­mat­ting” & “Text Con­ver­sion” issues result­ing in headline-only-posts at pos­ter­ous blog (see my first com­ment for details), pos­ter­ous would sub­se­quently post the same derailed headline-only post at blogger.

    Total dis­as­ter x2.

    Also tried Tum­blr but their post by email is even worse… cre­ates one long para­graph (removes para­graph breaks) & no pho­tos show up.

    I am shocked all these newer greater blogs can­not even han­dle basic email-posting like the old dinosaur, Yahoogroups, can.

    • archaeme

      This is why email is an unre­li­able way to blog.

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  • http://mymediaradio.com Inter­net Stream­ing H

    Great info and a great theme too, I use this one on sev­eral sites! Keep up the great work!

  • http://tarah.me Tarah

    It’s worth not­ing that Pos­ter­ous allows you to use any Tum­blr tem­plate, so there are actu­ally thou­sands of options, not 18. Also, you can import an exist­ing blog from other plat­forms, such as Word­Press — Pos­ter­ous han­dles this pretty well.

    • Gazali

      I wasn’t aware that Pos­ter­ous allows you to use any Tum­blr tem­plates. If it can than it’s great. Can you kindly show us how to do it.
      And yes Pos­ter­ous han­dles import­ing exist­ing blogs very well. In fact they han­dle quite a num­ber of file types superbly.

  • http://www.bloguncel.com blog­ger

    Thanks For The Article!