News aggregator site and Digg-competitor Mixx had a rough June. Traffic to the site took a 68 percent nosedive in the U.S. from May to June, according to comScore (see chart). Compete shows a similar trend.
Wondering if Mixx had maybe been paying for traffic and had now stopped, I asked CEO Chris McGill if this was the case. Absolutely not. He replied: “We have never paid for traffic… Not once. How could we? … We have operated for two years on almost no money.” Hard to argue with that. Mixx has only raised $3.5 million to Digg’s $40 million, and is “nine guys sitting in a boiler room.”
So what happened? McGill admits, “We had some performance problems in the month of June.” A database problem and a DNS change ended up temporarily blocking Google. Traffic was only down 30 percent, says McGill, and has almost fully recovered in June. He sent me a screen grab from Google Analytics (below) showing that in the first half of July, unique visitors tripled to 1.5 million compared to the first half of June. For the full month of June, he sent me a Google Analytics page showing 1.8 million total visitors. (comScore’s estimate for U.S.-only unique visitors in June was 337,000, but it typically under-reports traffic for small sites).
If Mixx’s drop was just a technical issue (and I have no reason to doubt McGill’s explanation, he was very upfront with me), then comScore and Compete should pick up the site’s rebound in their July numbers. I hope that’s the case because Digg needs competition. For instance, in April, Mixx started experimenting with showing ads based on user voting, a great idea which Digg then started taking seriously in June. And just yesterday, it launched TweetMixx to tap into hot links appearing on Twitter.
Random: WHy in April or May did Google in Analytics get rid of the graph chart and replace it with a DOT as seen above in MIxx’s G.A. chart.
I liked seeing the graph that showed each day’s traffic.
Because it is grouped by month. See the Group By icon in the upper right.
I think silicon valley is getting a warped sense of things – “only” $3.5million? I know a lot of companies can do an awful lot with that. Compared to the tens or hundred million raised by other companies (for what again exactly?) I really wonder about how these figures are bandied about.
I don’t have time for either Digg or Mixx anymore it seems, but I have always rooted for Mixx. Their staff is way more up front and honest and overall treat their users with more respect. I really hope they can not only recover, but eventually over take Digg.
Think they can’t do it? With less staff they think of ideas and get them live months before Digg can. That’s just good business and in the long run should make investors more happy.
3,5M is enough money if you ask me. it’s not like they offered something new.
want fresh ideas for social bookmarking? try http://10things.me/ .
Alexa report does show the traffic is picking up.
http://www.alex...teinfo/mixx.com
Wow – slow news day I guess
Wow, it’s sunday?
Mixx sounds like a site on its way to death, in my experience.
There’s a site called Mixx?
And once again, we have a start-up that’s supposed to be advertising supported, but doesn’t believe in advertising itself.
Marketing people do exist in techie land, don’t they? Or do they spend all their time coming up with nonsense names?
Sorry, techies, this ain’t “Field of Dreams”: just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come.
It’s weird that this happened — I just started to use Mixx in June. I hope I didn’t have anything to do with their sudden decrease in traffic
Haha, jokes aside though. That is a HUGE drop in traffic. I wonder what “performance” issues they had.
This is a sad news for Mixx. Hope they can bring the traffic they had before.
@Phreddy Tran,
Seriously? They built it and now have 1.5 million uniques monthly … seems to me like they came. Not even Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones could handle 1.5 million.
The field of dreams comparison might be missed on your part. The goal was not to build the largest or most dominating baseball field — it was to build the vision Costner and only Costner saw, and that people would flock to that vision. I think McGill built a hell of a site from a hell of a vision and I along with 1.5 million others are flocking and enjoying.
And for the record, there was never a second game played on that “field of dreams”, not really the best model with respect to sustainability to be comparing yourself too.
68% drop??? JESUS! Unbelievable drop!
Can a site recover from something like this? I don’t think so.
Thanks Erick for a great article!!!
could your comment be anymore creepy crawly?
It was looking promising for a while but I think that space is just lost. I think its hard to scoop news with twitter on the scene.
Mixx is filtering autosubmit like a b1tch
at least digg still helps webmasters ;-P
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