I had seen this commenting kit before, almost a year ago it seems, but it was kind of buggy at that time. Maybe they’re improved on it since then.

http://js-kit.com/comments/?wow

I’m using it as a commenting platform on my Blogger blog. Till now it is working very well for me.

I hope you like it.

I assume you’re talking about the Host Gator plan. It’s not a bad option although you could get burned by having too much traffic. Also, a cost to consider is the domain renewal at about $15-20 a year, if you get privacy, which I highly recommend. If you have 100 blogs on 100 domains you better be making enough to cover the cost or else use subdomains.

The thing about WordPress.org is that they don’t allow you to monetize, period. Blogs there can be useful in other ways but they’re still fairly aggressive about dealing with what they consider spam.

A couple of items:

a) hosting WordPress
This will give you a monthly fixed cost of at least $5 and probably more. Multiply this out over 50 or 100 niche blogs and it can really add up.

That assumes you have a host where you have to pay for a new hosting account for every site/blog. I have an account with a well known provider (rhymes with elevator) on which I can add sites at my pleasure without affecting the monthly fee, which is modest anyway.

b) degree of difficulty
While I recommend people don’t use Blogger for business for the reasons you have listed, I have to say that there is merit in the argument that WordPress can be a killer for people without the tech background. I’ve been fiddling with html for years and can put up a (not very elegant but functional) website fairly unaided, but I would not like to even think about the hours I have spent getting WordPress to work for me and not the other way around. Legions of volunteers and support forums are great - if you speak the language (WordPress experts can be very cruel and arrogantly rude to newbies on the support sites).

Too often I’ve seen total newbies led up the garden path by well-meaning people, who might not actually see themselves as techies and even attest that they are not, telling others that setting up and managing a WordPress site on your own server is easy/a breeze/you just use Fantastico to install/.

The option of an own domain, hosted WordPress site, ie from WordPress.org not WordPress.com, may be not attractive to multiple niche site players but useful for others - for around $10 a month people can have someone else take care of the basics, make sure the site is set up, security managed etc. As far as I know, with this option you would get the multiplication you have mentioned, i.e. a new account for every site.

It depends on what you’re going for. I do think WordPress is better for a social blog. For a monetized niche blog, Blogger has some things going for it, particularly if you don’t want to throw away that $70 you mentioned on a test market.

I’m a wordpress for life person myself unless of course another third party script rivals it which would be difficult considering all the mods and free templates already available for it. Blogger is great for a first blog if you’re unsure but seriously it runs at ~70$ a year to maintain; easily within most people’s budget.

Wordpress all the way; it’s been debated to death but if you’re serious why not own it straight up for ~$70 a year compared to something you COULD loose to do a wrongful TOS violation etc…

[Edit: I blended your moderated comment, with a link, with your unmoderated comment.]

The commenting system is certainly the weakest link in the Blogger system. Maybe someday soon Google will address this properly.