AOL Rebrands Netscape Social News Site As Propeller
AOL (NYSE:TWX) has re-branded its Netscape social news ranking site as Propeller.com (not online yet). As we noted last week, AOL had pulled the plug on Netscape’s 14-month experiment as a Digg-like news aggregator after finding that users didn’t accept the change. Netscape has since gone back to being a general news portal, similar to what’s on the AOL main page. In a Netscape blog posting announcing the update, Tom Drapeau noted that the Propeller site is not live yet and didn’t offer a time when the new site would materialize.
In his post last week, Rafat speculated that the Netscape site would eventually be merged with AOL News. As for Propeller, Loren Baker at Search Engine News said that since the site has no back links currently available, Propeller “will not initially drive the same SEO rankings and PageRank 7 power links as the old Netscape.com did/does.” He expects that at some point during its development, it will build connections with news sites and blogs within the social news sharing and ranking arena, “especially with all of the Netscape redirects and expected links from AOL properties.”
I worked at Netscape and spent a lot of time on the transition to the Digg clone format (I thought it was a huge mistake). In working with the finance folks I was adamant that their rosy projections were not based in reality. The expected a breif decrease followed by soaring numbers. The reality is that they took a portal that was generating 180MM page views per week and turned into one that is now doing approx 35MM per week. That's a success — right?
To the folks who were behind this disaster — Jason Calacanis and Jim Bankoff — all I can say is I told you so. You did a great job of putting the final nail in the coffin of what was a great brand.