Free blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger are widely used for driving traffic to bigger websites . However, in recent weeks, there seems to be a major change in the urls of blogspot blogs, with the url getting redirected to a country specific TLD. So visitors to the same blog in different countries will see a different url.
With this change, bloggers with networks of free blogger/blogspot blogs could see a change in their valuation and usage. Many smaller blogs are monetized by selling text link advertising, and country specific TLDs would make it difficult to set a uniform price. Search engines / search engine bots also handle redirects differently.