DISQUS

louisgray.com: louisgray.com: On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying

  • pjbrunet · 1 year ago
    Microsoft and Myspace will do fine, the others I don't think so.
  • Dorai · 1 year ago
    Are search terms a true indication of a trend? What if I search a site, bookmark it and don't search again?

    Is there another trend that newer services are always searched more than older?
  • Louis Gray · 1 year ago
    They can be used as one data point, for sure. The trends on Google and Yahoo!, and even Friendster, worldwide, are up and to the right. If you can't grow your brand in a time when global use of the Web is increasing, there's something wrong. The graphs above, while not perfect, definitely can show when a brand is dying, and when one is doing well. I believe that these others are an early "tell" in the court of public opinion.
  • felix · 1 year ago
    Is this true only because most of web2.0 doesn't actually make any money? Their "revenue" so to speak, then, is their traffic. So since companies have to show growth of some sort - if it isn't actually money (which could grow for a variety of reasons uncorrelated to traffic) for most websites that's going to have to be traffic.
  • Mark Dykeman · 1 year ago
    The trends are interesting, no question, but aren't they a bit misleading? For example, most people don't search for the word "Digg" to find its site, at least not more than once. Then they bookmark the URL or else they just memorize it to go back. Therefore, there would be a lot of traffic hitting Digg without resorting to Google as the gateway. Moreover, if you're going to search for news stored on Digg's site, aren't you going to do that directly on their site, most often by scanning the popular or upcoming pages?

    The trend may be an indication that there's not a continually growing number of people who are discovering Digg through Google. However, I'll bet there's more Digg growth coming through blog posts, forums, or word of mouth referrals than cold searching in Google.

    Just a thought to consider.
  • Marcin Grodzicki · 1 year ago
    Louis, what you showed here is a classic product life-cycle. It's the same everywhere, not only in the web-business (most of you are probably aware of that). However, I would say that Myspace and Digg are currently in the "cash-cow" phase, so their owners should focus either on extending it or on reinventing into the 'star' phase (rather than killing them). Also, it's worth a notice that Digg and Myspace are the only ones that made it (sort of) into mainstream (MSFT excluded, of course) so their reinvention should take place in the mainstream market rather than the geeks. MSFT is obviously in the 'old dog' phase, but hey, everyone knows that ;)
  • Phil Gomes · 1 year ago
    The interesting thing is that the Technorati curve appears to follow a shallow version of the Gartner Hype Cycle.
  • ben · 1 year ago
    I think RSS has a lot to do with the decline of search. I search once, find something I like, and RSS it so I go directly to the source and remove the middle man (and time) from my processes. An RSS opt-in reporting system would be nice...
  • ShiningRay · 1 year ago