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Netscape’s Traffic Plummets

by Darren

I guess just about anyone could see this coming. Valleywag calls this post the Calacanis Effect and shows some leaked internal traffic numbers that show the re-designed Netscape has gone straight in the crapper. I guess there was no question that such a mediocre website, which pushed out its’ main constituency would end up in this boat.

Except Netscape visitors, most of whom only stuck with the neglected portal out of habit, were the worst subjects possible for Jason’s radical experiment. Traffic the week of June 18th, before the Netscape team remade the front page, was 137m pageviews. The following week, as Netscape decommissioned areas such as news and weather, it declined to 115m. The new front page, a clone of Digg.com, went live on June 29. The first full week after the change, traffic had plummeted further, to 72m pageviews. The Comscore numbers, which help advertisers allocated their budgets to different internet properties, mirror this decline.

At this point, you honestly have to wonder how long (or short) it will be before AOL pulls the plug on this experiment. The social news website at Netscape hasn’t seemingly evolved at all in its’ 4 or 5 month stint, and it’s obvious to anyone that it won’t grow at all. The Calacanis model just didn’t work out. Paying the so-called “top contributors” to turn in news stories is no guarantee of building a thriving site, and this case, it certainly hasn’t.