11 Reasons for hosting your blog on the blogspot domain

These days, the so called "Blogging and SEO experts" are spouting up everywhere and dishing out free advice that not only beats rationality and common sense but also hinges along the lines of elitist agenda. While searching something regarding blogger platform today, I came across this weird article titled 11 Huge Reasons to AVOID Blogspot in 2021.

Most of the reasons given by the author just amount to "because most other people don't use it, so you shouldn't use it too".

Reason number 2 (they don't perform well in google search) is plain hogwash. I've myself landed upon blogspot posts while googling several times and you'll find both professional and personal high-traffic websites hosted on blogspot platform such as Java Revisted, Mikusa, Quiet Scotland Blog, etc.

So in this article, I'm squashing out these ill-informed advises one by one by giving valid reasons for why you should be using the google blogger platform more instead of rejecting it.

1. No, you WON'T hurt your brand/credibility. This obviously doesn't apply to large MNC companies (but they hardly meddle with these blogging platforms anyway as they have their own infrastructure). As for personal individual blogs, I just don't see what's the harm in having it on a blogger subdomain. I think its elitist to think that only those who can afford a proper custom domain are eligible for hosting blogs or enjoying this so called "brand" or "credibility".
2. Yes, they DO perform well in Google searches. "Content is King" is still the mantra of the Internet. Of course, nobody has the source code for Google ranking algorithms but its a very practical and common sense thing to deduce that your blog's content should be THE most important priority in ranking. Other things like having a subdomain, meta tags, title tag, h1 headers, etc. is what I consider SEO optics and aesthetics. In the larger scheme of things, these things hardly matter at all. Even for a fully "SEO optimized" site or blog, there is no way to substantially prove that a given site or link may not have ranked the way it ranked if it were to rank solely on the basis of content and not these aesthetics.
3. No, it won't be challenging to acquire backlinks. At the start of the article, the author terms "website.blogspot.com" an "ugly and traditional" subdomain. These trigger words reflect an elitist mindset which is getting increasingly common these days, especially in the US of A. Of course, there are elitist people who have a disdain towards the blogger subdomain and you'll find it banned on many subreddits owned by such people. But that doesn't make this platform bad in any way.
4. Yes, you CAN build your website authority even with blogspot. Here is the story of a blogger who painstakingly grew his blogspot hosted blog's reputation, made it to rank on google and get traffic in thousands but then it all dwindled as he migrated to a custom domain one day after listening to "experts"! Eventually, he had to switch back to his old blogspot subdomain as he found it much harder to get back the page and domain authority which blogspot had gained him.
5. Yes, you do OWN your blog. Platform ownership in the digital world is tricky to properly define. You don't REALLY own anything in the technical sense, do you? Its your DNS provider who owns your com/org domain and leases you on terms, its the hosting provider (AWS, Digital Ocean, etc.) who owns your computing or hosting space, its the ISP who owns your bandwidth, etc. And all of this can be pulled away from under your feet at the snap of a finger as the social media platform Parler recently found out. Though it "owned" a domain name, hosting space, etc., it never really owned anything in the real sense. But in all practicality, as long as you stick to Google's terms and conditions, you should be fine on Blogger (or at least as fine as on any other service!). And thus you can say that you "own" your blog in at least some sense.
6. Of course, you must follow the T&C. Again, as mentioned above, this applies to any kind of service or platform and not just Google's blogger. If you purchased a custom domain through Namecheap or GoDaddy, that will be subject to some terms and conditions too.
7. Yes, you CAN monetize. You'll find blogspot blogs in the wild that have used all kinds of monetization options such as Adsense, Amazon Associates, Media Vine, etc.
8. Customization is limited, but do all bloggers need it?. Yes, this is one thing where I agree with the referred post. Customization is indeed limited on blogger, but I'm one of those guys who hardly need any customization in basic blogging functionality. Of course, you can customize everything on the front-end like design your own theme, custom code your CSS, etc. But the underlying structure of posts/pages, categories/labels, etc. will remain the same. You can customize the permalinks for each post or page. But having said that, blogger is no wordpress or drupal and I don't need it to be.
9. Many com/org domains are "brutalized" with spam too. The author makes it the platform's fault if too many people are spamming it which is plain wrong. If you receive spam in your GMail mailbox, will you blame Google for sending the spam? There are many spamming sites on com/org top level domains too, who should I blame for that?
10. You don't have to move to a custom domain at all. Indeed, as mentioned in this story, there are great risks involved when you move from a subdomain to a custom domain and it mostly relates to losing established authority in the eyes of Google and thus lose organic traffic to your site. And that's exactly why you don't want to do it. You can just stick to the blogspot subdomain right until the end of times! And if you chose a custom domain instead, do it right from the beginning so as to avoid the risk of switching.
11. "Committed" is a state of mind. Its incorrect to presume that a blogger who works with the Google's blogspot platform isn't committed or dedicated enough in any way. At the end of the day, its just one platform among many, you can take it or leave it!