Xanga, one of the world's biggest blogging communities with around 27 million users, launched a video product yesterday. Xanga Videos offers unlimited video hosting for all Xanga members, whether they have free or paid accounts. However, it's not clear whether the unlimited hosting will be permanent. Xanga Videos also provides options to link to the videos and embed them in Xanga blogs and elsewhere (MySpace, hi5, Piczo, Multiply etc). If you're a Xanga member, you'll see your own videos at videos.xanga.com - if not, you'll see nothing (although you can view the intro video here). And that's a massive, massive problem - unlike YouTube and MySpace Video, there's no centralized place to explore the video content. Instead, you have to stumble upon videos by visiting individual profile pages and blogs.
In short, Xanga is a gated community, and Xanga Videos continues that trend. You can understand why: Xanga's demographic is fairly young, and a closed community is considered safer. Nonetheless, all the recent stats I've seen for Xanga are flat or declining - the latest data from Hitwise suggests a decline in market share against MySpace, and search volume and blogosphere mentions are also down. Public stats are highly inaccurate, but I do wonder if Xanga's closed nature might hold it back.
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