@amyhallbiz I’m glad you brought this thread up as in another thread someone mentioned that they suggested to a client to use Wordpress.com as it was better for them. 

I personally can’t see what the advantage of letting someone else own and control your intellectual property would be. 

I’m sure there are the arguments of “cost” however in today’s marketplace it’s 10 bucks for a domain and you can get a year of hosting for under $50 bucks at HostGator (which includes cPanel and phone support for the less tech savvy). 

For me the only reason I would suggest or personally put up blogs or content on non-owned platforms is to create feeder sites. 

Since you posted this thread, I see I’m not the only one. 

Is there anyone out there who would like to enlighten on why a non-controlled platform; whether it be Blogger, Tumblr, Wordpress.com or even Facebook would be beneficial as the main property for publication and promotion?

@amyhallbiz I always suggest going self-hosted. There are so many terms of service you could violate on a platform like wordpress.com or blogger.com that you may not know about. The result of doing so would be the loss of all of your content, comments, etc. At least with self-hosted Wordpress, you can backup your data, so if your host were to cut your site, you could take your backup and start elsewhere.

@kristi-hines @dakotalocal @juleswebb @amyhallbiz@donpurdum 
I’m with Jules on this one…where most of my customers have gone with Blogger due its easy of use (very user friendly) and that its free and owned by Google (a trusted source).  
I don’t think they think of it as them owning their content, they just host it. And you can back up your blog on blogger any time, as well as the template design.
And there’s ways of copyrighting your material as well to protect it. 
And they can easily move to Wordpress later on if desired (and it’s an easy migration).
My personal blog is a Blogger blog as its for my crafting business and when I first started out, that is what someone recommended and it was very easy to use.  Then i launched my business Blogs By Heather and focus on writing  how-to articles on blogging for  Blogger and TypePad and some WordPress as well as now I am familiar with that as well.  I focused on Blogger and TypePad as another business partner, WebsByAmy.com was the guru of WordPress. So I would send her work, she’d send me work and we have a nice circle, business network as we work with a few graphic designers as well (but are looking for more). Further more my blogging articles are how-to so I have to have accounts in all three platforms for testing and to write the articles.
Anyway, I do see why a self hosted Wordpress blog is essential and desired, but I also understand why people choose Blogger or Wordpress.com (and others like it).
Heather

It’s the writer that people follow, not the content.

My blogs are hosted with blogspot.com and I am happy with that. I am not worried if blogspot takes down my site and I lose all the content I have written. I’d probably get angry about it for an hour, but I am not going to dwell on it.

If jimsyyap.com were to suddenly go 404 on the web, simply go to google and search for “Jim Syyap”. Try it. From there you will find my presence on other social media websites. I can always point you to the URL of my new blog or website.

What about page rank and SEO?

As you know by now, I do not care about page rank. Blogging for me is a means of self expression. I can always write about whatever it is that interests me. If someone else is interested in that topic, one way or another, they will eventually find my blog.

As writers, we will never run out of content to write about. As long as I am writing, I can come up with something good every now and then.