AOL’s Propeller launched in 2006 as a “Digg Killer” – a Digg like site with editorial oversight that had massive netscape.com traffic directed to it. All those Netscape users were used to seeing a standard news page, though, and didn’t quite know what to do at the new site.
A variety of changes were made over time, including paying news submitters to lure them from Digg, changing the name to Propeller.com, and occasional layoffs. They even added a mascot. But nothing has stopped the decline of the site, and now AOL is appealing to previous users to come and give it another try.
A year ago 4.6 million people a month visited the site (Comscore worldwide). Now its 2.1 million, more than a 50% decline in unique visitors. Page views have also dropped by 50%, to just 6 million/month. Revenue is likely in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars per month at best, meaning that it is almost certainly costing AOL money to keep the lights on at the site.
It’s pretty clear that Propeller is a candidate to enter the deadpool, although the upside is the people working on it could go to more interesting projects at AOL. But they’re not giving up just yet. In an email to registered users who haven’t signed in recently (that would be me), Propeller General Manager Tom Drapeau said:
Hello–
We at Propeller have noticed that while you have an active account with us, we haven’t seen you for a while. This e-mail is being sent to encourage you to come pay us a return visit, with the hope that you will consider making Propeller a part of your daily news consumption.
Over the past several months, we have greatly improved the experience at Propeller. We have added a member comment page and a Groups directory, added several RSS feeds, comment detail pages, greatly improved the homepage, added story sharing, member blocks, and improved the story submission process, allowing for images to be picked for stories.
We have also spent a considerable amount of time improving Propeller’s performance, the end result of which is a more functional, better looking and better performing site.
Propeller remains a news community with a strong politics and current events influence, where many different political views are heard and oftentimes spur substantive discussion on topics such as President Barack Obama, his first 100 days, and his domestic and foreign agendas. We also have our share of fun, with jokes, satire and YouTube videos populating our Humor category, as well as compelling submissions in our Arts & Entertainment, Business & Finance, Science & Technology, Religion, Style, Health & Fitness, Family and Sports categories.
We understand that you might have signed up on Propeller, only to have life events conspire against your time for online news reading. We especially understand given the current hard economic times. We are asking you to take a few minutes and pay us a visit. If Propeller isn’t to your liking, and you would like to tell us why, please leave your feedback here–it is greatly appreciated.
Sincerely,
Tom Drapeau
GM, Propeller.com
I have my doubts as to whether this’ll lead to a spike in unique visitors next month, but it shows they still have some fight in them. Good luck, Tom. I hope our next post on Propeller is something more positive.
Deadpooled
I tried using Propeller earlier this year. It’s nice, effective, but the RSS feeds are a PITA and crippled it for me. I got tired of duplicated / triplicated etc. entries and erratic updates for the group I followed. What could have been pretty cool was utterly useless by two simple, basic things.
I will review our group RSS feeds, and work on cutting down duplicates (which tends to affect most social submissions sites) is ongoing. Thanks for trying Propeller out–hope to see you again sometime.
Its not moving up from the past 1 year.
really? next you’ll be telling us that ‘water is wet’.
we see the power of “bad web design” here. A webservice is nothing with Interface and simplicity…
Propeller is the great another way beside digg
you say do so nice the on comment – forget don’t mixx.
this is great to know and now once again i’m putting there my blog news…thanks
Vidiya
I think they should come out of US market alone and focus on other emerging markets like India. Here Digg is not that popular and propeller has a chance to gain popularity from its parent website aol.in. They are already marketing aol.in very much and propeller.in may start floating on the name of AOL.
@Twirrim
I tried replying to your above comment but don’t see it in the stream, wonder if there is a threaded comment issue going on.
Anyhow, thanks for the feedback. We, along with most social submission sites, fight an ongoing battle to keep submissions unique. On the plus side, wrt your comment on groups, we have recently released an upgrade that allows for group owners to pre-screen story submissions before they hit (and hit RSS feeds). That should help in alleviating that concern.
Again, thanks for writing in. We aren’t pursuing much press coverage these days–we’re more focused on improving the Propeller experience and serving our members.
Thanks Mike for the free press! Its appreciated.
test
Between the lolcats and conspiracy theories at Digg, the Atheist storm at Reddit and the Utter Nonsense at Mixx I actually like Propeller a lot!
Daniel Larsson
https://spideroak.com
I have tried to get into other social news sites and I just can’t bring myself to care about any of them except Mixx myself. I only have accounts at Digg and Reddit to vote up friends stories. Propeller however I don’t even care about enough to do that.
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