Before the web
In the early days we used usenet groups, sharing files over IRC and text-based chat. usenet was pretty much a massive email chain. Free RPGs popped up in your email inbox and if it looked good, people would reply. Bandwidth was limited, so games were mostly just text.
Websites
Geocities and AOL allowed people to create websites relatively quickly for just about anything. HTML back then was easy to learn and you could get your .doc or .rtf RPG up onto a website relatively easily. Here's the Icar site from 1996 (hosted on my University web server).
You can see all the incarnations of here.
Onto blogs
Around 2003/2004, RPG sites started moving onto blogs. Better than their static web pages, which took effort to update, these often had their user interfaces for editing. Much easier! Wordpress and Blogger became the leaders for free roleplaying games and being freely hosted, it was a quick and powerful to get something out there.
The only downside of a blog is that people consider it dead if you don't post to it often enough. That's not a problem if it's an opinion blog but if you're using it to host the free RPG itself, that can be a problem. Even in the free world, people want to see that someone is working on it, that someone is looking after it. It's the curse of the news feed. Old websites didn't have that problem because as long as the site was there, it was considered live.
Social media sites
Facebook is trying to become the front page of the internet; and for many it is. Google+ is great for roleplaying too, my feed is bulging with RPG goodness. If you have a free RPG then it's quick and simple to create a social media page for it. Perhaps a Twitter account, or Tumblr (which feels more like blogging to me) and instagram. There are so many places to update ([url=https://ifttt.com/]IFTTT[url] is best used to do that).
Social media is handy if your fans are on it. They can see your feed along with everything else. The content goes to them in the same way that all cat pictures do. I like Facebook for the 'like' button. As an author having people press 'like' is a little but instant piece of joy feedback. Something that websites and blogs don't do very well.
Download host only
I think free RPGs are moving away from that. Sure, there are still people who keep blogs and social media pages but I think the majority go straight onto DriveThruRPG and IndiePressRevolution. With the advent of Pay What You Want PWYW (which I see as a nice way of donating), you want to keep people inside the place where they are shopping. You don't want them to go outside to a blog or website. They might pick up your game while buying something commercial and donate you a dollar or two at the same time.
Updating all the blogs, social media and web pages takes time, time better spent putting together $2 modules, maps, add-ons and so on. I quite like that. I think people should be given the chance to be paid for their hard work. I'm still keeping Icar PWYW with a suggested price of 0 and I will keep the website, the blog, the social media (because I enjoy it) but I do start feeling like a dinosaur.
Where do you keep up to date with free RPGs? Where do you download them from?
