Battles of the Big Boys
The largest companies in the online world continue to battle it out, with several releases in the last few months from several different websites vying for top spots. AOL (AOL-Time Warner)is the largest Entertainment company in the world and has been making several major moves to solidify the company online. The company released three big pieces to their online empire in the last few months, AIMPages, UnCut Video, and the reinvention of Netscape to a Digg-like website. We’ve talked about these releases from AOL in a couple posts on the digital eraÂ? and when AIMPages and UnCut Video were first released.
These were all important moves, but have they really paid off the way the Entertainment giant would have hoped? The top graph shows the traffic rank data for AIMPages over the last three months. There was an initial spike in rank, shooting up to nearlyÂ? a ranking of nearlyÂ? 5000, but the site seems to struggle to stay in the top 100,000. For a site like AOL, a social networking site is a no-brainer. The potential for the site to be built upon as a core service, or as a limb of the company that takes advantage of other core service features, is obvious to anyone following the industry. But for a respected giant like AOL to be doing so poorly out of the gates while relatively small and inexperienced sites have made greater impacts is probably somewhat of an embarassment. The AIM network that AIM Pages targets is still an important piece of the puzzle, but hopefully AOL can create a stronger pull to the site from their IM userbase.
Despite the troubles of AIM Pages, the Netscape experiment seems to be even worse. Michael Arrington made a post on TechCrunch about the troubles Netscape has been having. The powerhouse known as Digg apparently has a very small group that submits a majority of the stories, and Netscape is trying to buy them off. A post by Jason Calacanis,Â? the gentleman in charge of the Netscape property, offers the top 50 users on any of Netscape’s competing sites (DIGG, Delicious, Reddit, etc.). Looking at the ranking of Netscape for the last 6 months, the site is in steady decline. The one spike that is seen around mid-June is probably the official release of Netscape as a Digg-like website, and shortly thereafter, there was a huge decline in rank. This seems like a fairly desperate attempt at the corporate giant trying to buy and/or bully its way into the party. It’s easy to agree that these top users are worth being paid, but we still think this is desparation.
AOLÂ? could even beÂ? losing ground at the IM level. Yahoo! and MSN just released their newest IM’s that not only include the ability to have high quality video conversations, they’ve joined forces and allowed the two networks to work together with either IM. The MSN Messenger (or Windows Live Messenger) network and Yahoo! Messenger network combined is approximately 350 million users. This almost creates a situation where if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Will we soon see AIM added to this all-new IM network?
Not to be outdone, MySpace continues to plug along as the unstoppable juggernaught. The search on MySpace has now entered the mix as one of the top search engines. The release of MySpace Video and MySpace Comedy are definitely important in maintaining what the site has achieved, which, depending on who you believe, is either the number one site on the Internet or at leastÂ? something close to that.Â?
Google, meanwhile, seems to continue to thrash its arms around in no clear direction. Buoyed by the strength of its search engine and PPC ads, Google continues to do well. The only drawback to Google, it would seem, is that there is little if anything else they can do well outside of their search engine. A post by Paul Kedrosky today looks at the Hitwise data for the search giant. The following statement says it best:
In addition to how concentrated Google traffic remains — even when you take out core search — it’s also worth considering the percentage of top Google properties launched within, say, the last two years. The answer: None of the top five.
Â?