How did a book review site turn into a teenage diary?
Xanga launched in 1999, founded in New York by Marc Ginsburg, John Hiler and Dan Huddle. The first version was not a diary platform at all. It was a place to post short book and music reviews and read what other people thought of the same records.
The reviews were never the draw. The comment threads under them were. Xanga added weblog tools to user profiles and made blogging the core product in 2000, giving every account a dated entry stream and an open comment box. That pairing sounds ordinary now. In 2000, most people online had never read a blog, let alone kept one.
The audience that turned up was narrower than the founders planned and far more committed than they expected. Xanga's center of gravity was American high school and college students, with a heavy concentration in the emo, punk and alternative music scenes. The posts were confessional: arguments with parents, breakups, friendship math, song lyrics pasted in without explanation, messages aimed at one person who would know exactly who they were for. GeoCities had given teenagers a homepage. Xanga gave them a deadline.
What were eProps and blogrings?
Xanga's advantage was that it treated writing as a social act before the phrase social media was in general use.
Readers handed out eProps, a one-click token of approval that did the job a Like button would later do, and Xanga shipped it years before Facebook added its own. Users joined blogrings, self-organized groups built around a band, a high school, an anime series or a mood, which is how strangers with the same taste found each other. Subscribing to other blogs produced a running feed of updates, so a new post landed in front of people who had chosen to see it instead of sitting in an empty directory.
The pages themselves were editable down to the markup. Users rewrote layouts with their own HTML and CSS, set backgrounds, fonts and cursors, and embedded a song that started playing the second a visitor arrived. Opening a Xanga page in 2004 usually meant reaching for the volume key first.
None of it was subtle, and that was the point. An audience, a scoreboard and a page you could redecorate at 1 a.m. is a combination that kept teenagers posting for years.
Why did the FTC fine Xanga $1 million?
On September 7, 2006, the Federal Trade Commission announced that Xanga.com and its principals, John Hiler and Marc Ginsburg, would pay a $1 million civil penalty for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. It was the largest COPPA penalty the agency had assessed up to that date, more than twice the next largest.
The complaint was narrow and hard to argue with. Xanga's own terms said members had to be 13 or older, but the signup form let visitors through even when they entered a birth date showing they were younger. The FTC said the company had created about 1.7 million accounts over five years for users who had identified themselves as under 13, and had collected, used and disclosed their personal information without notifying parents or getting consent.
"Protecting kids' privacy online is a top priority for America's parents, and for the FTC," said FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras in the agency's announcement of the settlement in 2006.
The cash hurt a company of Xanga's size. The lasting damage was operational. Tighter age gates closed off the youngest end of the signup funnel at the exact moment Xanga needed growth to sell advertising.
How did Facebook take Xanga's users?
Facebook opened registration to anyone 13 or older with a valid email address in September 2006, according to the company's own announcement that month. The timing was brutal. The platform that would absorb the social internet threw its doors open the same month the FTC penalty against Xanga was made public.
Facebook did not beat Xanga at blogging. It removed the need to blog. A Xanga entry took a paragraph, a bit of formatting and a reason to write. A status update took six words about a math test. Groups were easier to find than blogrings, the Like button was simpler than eProps, and a single uniform layout turned out to be what most people wanted once the novelty of custom HTML wore off.
Money was the other half of it. Xanga ran on advertising plus a paid premium tier, and its users were teenagers with no budget for subscriptions and content that advertisers were not eager to sit beside. Registered accounts peaked near 27 million around 2006 and the user base began eroding in 2007. MySpace lost its own audience to the same migration, and Tumblr later ran into the identical problem of a large young audience that is hard to monetize.
What happened in the 2013 fundraiser?
By spring 2013 the servers cost more than the site earned. On May 30, 2013, the Xanga team posted a fundraiser with a simple choice: raise $60,000 by July 15 and rebuild on WordPress, or shut down. John Hiler said he would add $10,000 himself if the campaign reached $50,000.
The rebuilt site would be paid. "Since blogging memberships would be paid, we wouldn't have any ads on the blogs," Hiler wrote on the Xanga team blog in 2013. Free hosting, the thing that had brought in tens of millions of accounts, was finished. A blogging membership was quoted at $48 a year.
The old site was taken down on August 31, 2013, replaced by a placeholder, and Xanga 2.0 went live on September 3, 2013. Before the switch the team said it had backed up roughly 2 million blogs and about 25 terabytes of photos, and it worked on making those archives free to download for users who could still sign in.
It read like a rescue. In practice it was a handover to a much smaller group. Charging $48 a year in 2013, when WordPress.com, Tumblr and Medium were all free, asked for loyalty that most of the remaining users no longer had.
Is Xanga still in business in 2026?
Yes, in the narrow sense that xanga.com still resolves and Xanga 2.0 still runs. Old members can sign in and blogs that survived the 2013 migration are still served. Reading and commenting are free; publishing needs the paid membership.
What Xanga is not is a working community. It has been closed to new members since the original site shut down in 2013, there has been no relaunch or sale since, and the blogrings, the subscriptions feed and the eProps culture that made the place worth visiting are gone. In that respect it has aged worse than LiveJournal, which at least still takes new accounts.
Most of what users wrote between 1999 and 2013 is not on the public web anymore. Archive Team ran a rescue crawl of Xanga in 2013 and put what it captured into the Internet Archive, covering roughly 400,000 users out of an account base in the tens of millions. Some people downloaded their own archives during the migration. Most never did.
There is also a separate project, Xanga2 at xanga2.com, which is unaffiliated with Xanga.com and is running a signup waitlist for a rebuilt version of the 2003 experience with blogrings, mood icons and music players. It is a tribute, not a revival of the original.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Xanga still online?
Xanga is still online in 2026 as Xanga 2.0, the WordPress-based version that launched on September 3, 2013. Old members can sign in at xanga.com, but the site has been closed to new members since the original Xanga was taken down on August 31, 2013, and it has no active community.
When did Xanga shut down?
The original Xanga, the free platform that ran from 1999, was taken offline on August 31, 2013 after a fundraiser that asked users for $60,000 by July 15, 2013. It was replaced three days later by Xanga 2.0, a paid service quoted at $48 a year, so Xanga never formally closed as a company.
Why did the FTC fine Xanga $1 million?
On September 7, 2006 the Federal Trade Commission announced a $1 million civil penalty against Xanga.com and its principals for breaking the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. The FTC said Xanga had created about 1.7 million accounts over five years for users who gave a birth date showing they were under 13, and collected their personal information without parental consent. It was the largest COPPA penalty the agency had imposed at that time.