Ephemeral Reading

The recent shuttering of Geocities brings something up which I don't think many people have truthfully considered in the grand realm of "free" Internet services. If Geocities managed to last ten years or so after its heyday, what sort of lifespan will blogs experience. The Geocities article points out that cost probably wasn't the reason for the shuttering, but rather that there was no profit in keeping it open. How far back will Blogger, Blogspot, and other sites decide to store data, and at some point, will they charge for maintaining it? I think the same article mentions the average audience size for blogs is one person, which would indicate little ad revenue from the majority of pages maintained. Considering many, if not most, are like this blogger in the their frequency of updates, and you have the reason for so few readers of any given blog. Why go back if nothing changes? The odd thing, from the writer's perspective, is why keep writing if there isn't anyone reading, so you have your vicious circle. There may be an answer here, if one considers some of the successful blogs, they tend to be quite focused (DailyKos) or project driven (like the one that became Julie & Julia), meaning their audience is fairly specific. Then again, if you turn your blogging into a business or a novel, you no longer are concerned with what the free service's corporate parent will do years down the line with your material. Perhaps some bloggers have already considered this issue and are keeping their own copies of what they write on personal hard drives, and then backing those up appropriately, but with the recent removal of geocites from the web, perhaps now isn't a bad time to consider if you want to keep your old entries, and if so, how you will go about doing it.