Skip to main content

Poor Netscape - less Digg, more AOL

In what can only be termed a setback, AOL has announced that it is converting its Netscape Internet property from a social news site to a portal.

Combining Netscape's brand with the social networking flavor-of-the-day was supposed to create a "Digg-killer" and, of course, generate millions of ad impressions for AOL advertisers. In an interesting twist, Netscape used both community ratings and "anchors" who acted like editors to highlight the best stories or moderators to ensure highly ranked news items were clean and spam-free. Apparently, it didn't work out to the satisfaction of AOL management.

The social news site will live on at Propeller.com but it is not clear how much support it will receive from its parent. The three million or so page views per day that the Netscape domain was racking up will now be seeing an AOL-like experience.

A step backwards

AOL indicates that they are reacting to user feedback but, judging by comments on the Netscape blog, a number of users are pretty disgruntled by the change. It is hard to believe that users want yet another site that looks like AOL which, if you haven't noticed, doesn't look all that different from Yahoo (YHOO) (the wide view version). To see the sites for yourself, just click on the following links: AOL (www.aol.com), the old Netscape (www.netscape.com), the new Netscape (http://netscape.aol.com) and Yahoo (www.yahoo.com).

A sign AOL is in trouble?

There are rumors of large layoffs at AOL floating around the blogosphere. Could this be a sign of AOL hunkering down? Pulling in their horns and putting the experiments on the back burner? Now that Jason Calacanis, founder of WebLogs, has left the company, AOL is probably without a visionary left in house. AOL has made an acquisition of Tacoda which is a good move for bolstering their advertising network and ad technology. But what about the kind of content that might draw more visitors and page views? Mgnet is a neat idea (check it out on the lower left section of the AOL homepage) but it is not dramatic enough to make a difference in traffic.

Opportunity for competitors

If Jerry Yang wants to transform Yahoo, he should just buy AOL from Time-Warner (TWX) and shut down everything except MapQuest, Instant Messenger and email. Hopefully, a good portion of AOL's remaining traffic will find its way to Yahoo. And since Google provides search functionality for AOL, killing AOL would allow Yahoo to inflict a little pain on its arch-rival.

Disclosure: author owns none of the stocks mentioned in this article
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Time to be conservative with your 401K

Most of the posts I and other financial bloggers write are typically focused on individual stocks or ETFs and managing active portfolios. For those folks who are more conservative investors, those whose main investment vehicle is a 401K, for example, the techniques for portfolio management might be a little different. The news of stock markets falling and pundits predicting recession is disconcerting to professional investors as well as to those of us who are watching our balances in an IRA or 401K sag. What approach should the average 401K investor take? Let's assume that the investor is contributing on a regular basis to one of these retirement accounts. There are two questions that the investor needs to ask: 1. Should I stop putting the regular contribution into stocks? My feeling is that investors making regular contributions are being handed a present by the markets. Every week the market goes down, these investors are lowering their average cost. When markets reco...
7 comments
Read more

The Trouble with Trend Reversal Indicators

Many of us use various trend reversal indicators to time our trades. Our desire is to determine when prices have changed direction so that we can ride the new trend. Why doesn't it always work out? The first reason, of course, is that unforeseen events often drive prices in unexpected directions. That is something we can't change and it often makes all of us technical traders crazy. On the other hand, sometimes an unforeseen event is a prelude to a new trend. A stock spikes up on a what seems to be a one-time piece of good fortune and soon falls back. Does it start making its way back up or does it resume a previous down trend? The conflict within trend reversal indicators is that, though they can definitely tell when prices change direction, they suffer from two problems. One, they often can't determine how significant that move in prices actually will be. Two, they are often lagging indicators. As such, they can be late in providing a signal, sometimes leading the investo...
1 comment
Read more

Brazil - in a bubble or on a roll?

A couple of years ago, no one recognized the real estate bubble even though it was under everyone's nose. Now, analysts and bloggers are seeing bubbles everywhere they look. One of them, they say is in Brazil whose Bovespa stock market index has doubled in the last 12 months. Does the bubble accusation hold water? I don't think so and here are 7 reasons why Brazil is by no means a bubble economy: Exports have held up over the past year thanks to demand from China for Brazil's soya exports and iron ore. This was helped by the the Brazilian government's drive to improve trade links with Asia and Africa. Export diversification, spurred by a more active trade policy and increased focus on "south-south" trade under current president Lula, helped mitigate the decline in demand from OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries A "sensible" economic framework has been in place since the 1990's. This has included inflation ...
4 comments
Read more