louisgray.com - Latest Comments in On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying

Re: On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying

ShiningRay — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 23:48:57 -0000

What about website traffice?

http://trends.google.com/we...

Re: On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying

ben — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:38:37 -0000

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...

Re: On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying

Phil Gomes — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:08:23 -0000

The interesting thing is that the Technorati curve appears to follow a shallow version of the Gartner Hype Cycle.

Re: On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying

Guest — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:22:32 -0000

Microsoft and Myspace will do fine, the others I don't think so.

Re: On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying

Louis Gray — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:19:07 -0000

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.

Re: On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying

Marcin Grodzicki — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:19:26 -0000

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 ;)

Re: On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying

Mark Dykeman — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:09:10 -0000

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.

Re: On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying

felix — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:21:11 -0000

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.

Re: On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying

Dorai — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:41:48 -0000

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?