Multiply has announced the availability of its export tools to allow its bloggers to transfer their data to other platforms. Currently the export tools are only available to transfer content to Blogger while the company is still working on ability to export to Tumblr and WordPress. This is part of Multiply’s blog migration (including its social network) which the company plans to shut down on December 1st after it announced plans to concentrate on becoming an e-commerce marketplace.
Multiply CEO Stefan Magdalinski in his blog post gave a step by step method to use the export tools The same information was sent to Multiply members via email. Based on the FAQ, all posts and images can be transferred automatically to Blogger using the export tools. Even so, the tools do not support migration of personal messages. For media (photo and video) files, Multiply advises members to manually download them using the Download Master plugin for Google Chrome users and DownThemAll! for those using Firefox.
The decision to migrate was taken after Multiply no longer was able to bear the cost (including through cross subsidies) for the various blogs that had been hosted for years. During last week’s StartupLokal even on September 10, Multiply Country Manager Daniel Tumiwa mentioned that the total space that it requires to host all the blogs amount to 2.5 petabytes (2500 TB or 2.5 million GB). The cost to maintain that large of a hosting space is certainly massive and it becomes expensive if the current business model is no longer able to cover its operational costs.
Considering that the blog platform at Multiply is already obsolete and hasn’t been updated in years, Multiply’s bloggers are advised to adopt a more modern platform.
In the past year and a half, Multiply has been transitioning its core business towards e-commerce and moved its headquarters from Boca Raton in Floridia to Jakarta to focus on markets in Indonesia and the Philippines.
[Image via Flickr/pshab]
