Netscape Was Better As A Digg Clone: Viewers
Duncan Riley
29 comments »
Traffic on AOL’s Netscape portal has plummeted since the site dumped its social news voting model and reverted to a new portal, at least according to Alexa.
Unfortunately the comScore figures for Netscape aren’t yet available for September so we can’t confirm the traffic crash, but despite Alexa’s argued issues the crash in traffic as shown by Alexa is unlikely to be an Alexa only quirk.
Tony Hung, who first picked up on the traffic crash notes that “[the traffic crash] validates Jason Calacanis — and indeed all the hard work Netscape folks have done over the past year or so to cultivate a community in Digg’s shadow — that so many of the people at Netscape were genuine fans *of* social news.” He’s right.
If Alexa is to be believed, Netscape’s traffic is now at its lowest level ever and ranks at a miserly 2,200th, a far cry from the days where Netscape was in the top 10 destinations online or even in the Top 600 during its time as a Digg clone. Some one at AOL may have some explaining to do given that the decision destroyed the traffic (and value) of Netscape by over 50%.
Could it be like this?
- Nestcape is a classic portal. It has a somewhat loyal audience.
- It shifts to a voting/promoting site -> Regular “portal users” leave. New, let’s call them “2.0 users” come.
- The voting site moves to Propeller.com. Later 2.0 users move to Propeller. Current Netscape site is left abandoned without both the original loyal users and the later 2.0 users. Traffic sinks.
If that’s the case (and I’d love to see other points of view), it’s not that it was better one way or another. It’s that the whole strategy + later change didn’t make any sense and has in fact, killed the portal.
It might be a little too soon to say. Netscape is more than just a digg clone. I guess we have to wait and see what plans AOL have for the new Netscape.
Well, let’s include Propeller.com in that Alexa graph and see….
http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....tscape.com
Actually the drop is due to the Weblogs Inc bloggers no longer submitting and voting for their own content. Now they’re back to just digg.
Someone also needs to remember about 6+ years ago after aol bought netscape, aol forced all the netscape email accounts like bob@netscape.com and forced them to an aol email. I can’t remember if it was aol.com or another one associated with them. This meant that if bob was taken, you had to choose another handle.
It was craziness cause they had a lot of users users and there had to have been 50-70% conflicting names. That was the last time I used their email service…
AOL destroys another social network…
See the traffic of propeller.com
http://traffic.alexa.com/graph.....eller.com/
Most visitors just go to propeller. Visitors just change domain.
I just noticed that nestcape.com now redirects to netscape.aol.com.
So I guess the whole argument is just flawed then. It doesn’t take into account what I mentioned before, and it doesn’t consider that netscape.com is now a redirect to netscape.aol.com.
So with all due respect, may the author of the research step up and share his thoughts on this, or do we need to continue speculating about half baked data? Or am I missing something here?
Better image
http://traffic.alexa.com/graph.....&w=610
ABSURD - any argument that attempts to prove that Jason Calacanis knows what he’s doing.
@ABD in Comment #1 :
EXACTLY!
That’s practically a word-for-word of what I wanted to point out when I read this.
It’s simple logic… Hardly the vindication the Clone fans are spinning it as.
They simply never should have left the Portal model to begin with.
never understand why chaning Netscape to propeller.
I used to stroll on Netscape but not Digg.
Looks like the writer of this article could have dug a little deeper before writing this article. Commenters brought up two critical points:
1) netscape now redirects to netscape.aol.com, in other words we need to be looking at traffic data for aol.com as well as netscape.com.
2) Propeller traffic data also needs to be taken into account.
Speaking of propeller and all that…can anyone tell me what is the new thing in propeller besides the logo?
RBA and Ralph Finklestein are dead on for part of the apparent drop in traffic as are the domain name differences. There is no tracking from prior to the Calcanis version to now. I have heard it whispered that the change from the old Netscape homepage to one replicating Digg had a large drop in ad revenue. The drop was in 20 to 40 percent after the switch, but I never heard whispers if the revenues came back up in the time since.
Netscape is a waste of bandwith and disk space, all non-MS crap is!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Click my name for my thoughts on the traffic drop - unfortunately Tony and Duncan took an Alexa chart and didn’t do any further research.
It is obvious that the social Netscape would be more popular than another MSN or Yahoo type news portal.
Many new people visited Netscape for the first time in years. The controversial idea of paying the Digg and Reddit top members really helped get publicity for this site in the beginning.
Sometimes, news appeared on Netscape before appearing on Digg or Reddit.
Is the end of Web 2.0 near, so soon, traffic is dipping for Wikipedia and Facebook as well
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
Alexa graphs aside, submissions at propeller are about the same as their pre switch rates. Continued activity among the community there after a switch is more of a sign of a dedicated fan base rather than traffic stats in my opinion. Ad revenue and non-fan-base traffic will only exist if the base activity is there in the first place.
Also, if I remember correctly, Calacanis saved the Netscape brand from totally being disposed of by AOL. At least now, there is the Netscape 9 browser and the portal. Had Calacanis not done this, the original Netscape portal users would have been all lost anyway.
http://youlaughyoulose.blogspot.com/
The reason its not working as well is b/c firefox is taking over. The people who liked Netscape now Love firefox for the same reason they liked Netscape. I’m shocked that Opera hasnt caught on more.
What’s interesting is that it went from a Digg Clone to a Yahoo Clone. LOL
You gotta love it.
Alexa is easy to spam and Calacanis spams Alexa, thats well-known. Its also well known that Calacanis and Arrington are friends and business partners, you should be careful about running press releases announcing his vindication, makes you look like a tool.
Alexa rating for netscape increase more after reverting to news portal thing. Hope that propeller takes digg down. I don’t like there shitting spam policy, plus blocking sites because the blogs or sites fans submit there content too often. Just pray digg smokes out.
Netscape.com now redirects to netscape.aol.com. On Alexa, it looks like the drop in netscape traffic shows up as an increase in AOL traffic.
Could Netscape 9 have something to do with this also. I was a big fan of Netscape 8 as it offered so many features over then IE6 and Firefox which it was partly based off of. But Since Netscape 9 come out the browser has lost so many things I enjoyed e.g. the Security Center, passcard, the personal bar that contained the local weather, the dual browser engine switch. Netscape 8 was a overlook feat of a browser. Netscape 9 is basically a crippled Firefox 2 with Netscape branded skin.
What RBA says about AOL plus indeed let’s not forget about the Propeller replacement for the social part of Netscape - although it is still a very stupid decision from all points of view to do all that was done to the old Netscape…
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