Social voting remained a popular past time in 2007 with sites such as Digg more than tripling their audience, but some sites fared better than others according to data from comScore.
One name with a long history is the AOL owned Netscape.com. The site was relaunched in June 2006 as a Digg clone with high hopes that a new generation would use the once great brand as an alternative to Digg. The strategy failed dismally, but the termination in the end was even worse. From November 2006 through to August 2007 (the last full month as a Digg clone) Netscape’s traffic dropped from 305 million pages views a month to 137 million, a 55.1% drop in 9 months. AOL dumped social voting on Netscape September 19, and things went from bad to worse, with traffic dropping in August from 137 million page views to a dismal 38 million in November, down 72.3%.
The new home for the Netscape social voting experiment Propeller performed reasonably, but failed to capture most of Netscape’s previous social voting audience. With 13 million pages views (according to comScore) in November 07, Propeller has managed to pick up less than 10% of Netscape’s August audience.
The big winner once again in the social voting space was Digg. Starting at 11 million page views in November 2006, Digg saw a 318% increase in traffic to 46 million 12 months later. Reddit fared well increasing from 2 million page views in February 2007 (the first month it was big enough to be recorded by comScore) to 9 million in November, although October was a highpoint with 16 million page views.
This is confusing; is this suggestion that Netscape lost 150 million viewers in 9 months as a result of Social bookmarking as opposed o their portal.
It does not seem credible
Although Netscape Social was very biased over who made the homepage – it would not likely affect the casual visitor
There must be other factors for the decline
Digg is understandably getting popular as it adds more categories and other sites bookmark to it
But it still is very biased over who gets homepages
Thanks AOL. Well done.
Great chart!
Sorry. After all I’ve seen, I don’t trust comscore data.
I thought Reddit users are more than Propeller users?
It seems, that those “Digg”-Sites losing audience in general. Perhaps a fashion grown over…
@gregory .. I couldn’t agree more
Hey, wanna know what really killed Netscape???
http://www.usdo...xhibits/684.pdf
They’ve been dead ever since making the graph and the article irrelevant.
These are not different votes. Most people vote on multiple sites. So we need more in depth analysis to understand what is happening with the overall picture especially in the last three months where Digg seems to be flattening out and Reddit seems to be beginning to take a dive. Too early to see trend lines.
Is this the same AOL that tried to charge my dad $250 for wanting to cancel dialup service?
We’re probably brothers Smooch. Or do you think AOL could have possibly did this to multiple customers? :X
Based on your chart, seems like social voting is loosing overall. Your chart shows netscape with over 300 million page views in nov 06. In nov 07, it looks like all four combined doesn’t even get half that. Am I getting misinformed, or is this a good analogy of the data here? Can you spell b-u-b-b-l-e.
do you think the decline in numbers is anything to do with the fact that netscape (i mean the browser) users are migrating over to firefox, since netscape/AOL hardly seem to be promoting their browser any more (does it even still exist!?) – and most of the people visiting netscape.com just had it as their default start page – and for the same reason: why do you think MSN.com is so popular!
Quite possibly, other major sites have been gaining since 2006. *WINK*
>> Propeller has managed to pick up less than 10% of Netscape’s August audience.
Fake!
I can judge by quantity of traffic which gives to me propeller from his index page. Traffic there were on 10-20 % less, but not 90 %!
facebookjunkie ,
yup! I have read many cases of AOL customers complaining about similar cases.
Counting…. Netscape moving in to dead pool soon
AOL? Netscape?
My blog gets more traffic than both combined!
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/
How about russian Traffic
Should we vote on which is the best among the three?
A linear projection shows that Netscape will have negative traffic in 2008. Is that possible?
I was predicted this fall a few months ago:
http://danmoldo...s-netscape.html
The initial nestcape figures make no sens.
This is unbelievable. The initial traffic on Netscape is off the charts. Cant believe a site can dry out so soon so fast.
But Propeler.com is netscape.com now.
I think it’s past time for Duncan to learn some basic word usage. Perhaps it would be a good _pastime_ for him
Wow, I didn’t realize Netscape was so popular last year. What the hell happened to all that traffic.
Interesting, looking at the Alexa chart for DIGG over the last year it shows a DROP in traffic. Check for yourself http://www.alex...etails/digg.com
Feel so sorry for Netscape.com which is my supervisor’s favorite website
Its a pity that digg is for sale now, but it will continue to be bigg, i put this article with super good comments, on my blog,
http://www.tech...scapes-traffic/
…. excelent article by the way guys
sorry, guys this is my blog, made a big boo boo, http://www.open...e-and-microsoft
That’s for the spam Dan!
Netscapes decline since the digg clone launch is madness – Jason Calacanis destroyed Netscape?
I was under the impression that the massive loss of traffic was the removal of mail service from the Netscape portal, which was a strategic decision unrelated to the Calacanis experiment. I’m not sure of the facts, but the implication at the time was that the inherent strength of the Netscape portal was almost all driven by mail logins.
Jason could certainly give a better perspective, but it was my impression that when you exclude the mail login losses, the social news Netscape did better than the non-mail previous Netscape traffic.
If I’m remembering correctly (it’s Christmas eve, I’m not doing the research!), the real story here is probably the deep weaknesses of the Netscape brand, which were exposed when it was untethered from its email engine.
I guess this explains the surge of asshats and shitty articles that digg has vs. a year ago.
Wow, this is an interesting presentation. I always thought that Digg was the best. Thanks for sharing.
Elisha
Administrator
Credit Card Rewards – Credit Card Reward Programs – Rewards Credit Card
I think it is spam!
Fisher blog. Блог о рыбалке.
http://the-best...sh.blogspot.com