After 9 years as a WordPress and Jetpack user. Jetpack has now started to charge for stats. Bye, Jetpack!
You read it right. It’s no longer free to view your website stats if your site is deemed ‘commercial’ (ie. running Google Adsense). It’s a tiered system starting at something £6.95 per month for 10k views and upwards from there. Yes, really!
In my fury, Jetpack’s now been dumped, meaning no more stats, likes, related posts, or social media share icons, and because they’ve lost my goodwill, Jetpack Boost too.
Letting go and moving on from Jetpack.
I liked Jetpack, although it had bad press for slowing sites down, it featured a lot of handy tools all in one app, but with the advent of Google’s March update we need all the help we can get, so maybe ridding the bloat wasn’t such a bad thing? Did I really need half of those features? Time will tell.
Is this another nail in the coffin for Blogging?
I hope not. I’m hoping this is an enforced nudge in the right direction of a speedier, leaner site, but what’s next? A WordPress fee? The disappearance of free plugins? It doesn’t bear thinking about. All I know is that, once the cost of blogging overtakes revenue, it’s game over for me, and I suspect many others, or even everyone.
Blogging. Thinking ahead.
Many of us have had to roll with a few punches lately. But I think the best strategy is to keep the finger on the pulse of site optimisation (which I hope the departure of Jetpack will help with) and keep pumping out genuine, knowledgeable content to hopefully beat the threat of AI while we’re at it.
It’s an absolute minefield out there, at the moment, but let’s keep marching on!
Well, comments are still functioning at least, so please let me know about your fight below.
Yeah, that sucks and is not a good sign for the future. It very well could be due to a lack of interest in traditional blogs in favor of Youtube videos, and so WordPress is trying to find more ways to make money.
Absolutely. I sincerely hope it’s not the end after almost 10 years of blogging, but I have put some time into the Blogging Musician on YouTube and am getting up to 500 subsribers now.