Social Networking Web 2.0 Sites Declining in 2010
It seems like only yesterday when the term “Web 2.0″ starting popping up all over the place. It was the “new direction” of websites, providing an extra level of engagement on the web in the form of social interactions. Big, household names quickly emerged and became the leaders of the strange phenomenon we now refer to as social media.
In 2010, some of the biggest “Web 2.0″ sites have seen significant declines in traffic. A quick trip over to Compete makes this painfully evident, and makes me wonder how many of these web 2.0 giants will manage in the coming years.
Digg
Launched in December of 2004, Digg is one of the biggest social news websites to emerge during the last decade. As you can see from the graph, their unique visitor numbers were relatively stable throughout the end of 2009, beginning of 2010. However, when they launched the fourth version of Digg on August 25th, you the graph shows that things went downhill very quickly for them.
Many loyal Digg users were very disappointed with the newest iteration of the website. There were a ton of complaints about the removal of key Digg features (such as bury, favorites, friends submissions, upcoming pages, subcategories, and history search), and an unflattering resemblance to the current Facebook design.
Disgruntled users declared August 30th, 2010 as “Quit Digg Day”, and began digging up stories that appeared on rival social news site, Reddit. This filled the Digg front page entirely with links to Reddit.
On October 27th, 2010, Digg laid off 37% of its staff in an effort to refocus the company.
Delicious
Founded way back in 2004, and quickly acquired by Yahoo! two years later, Delicious became one of the biggest social bookmarking websites on the web. By the end of 2008, the website boasted more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URL’s.
As seen in the above graph, unique visitors to the Delicious website have been in rapid decline over the past few months. Then, on December 16, 2010, an internal slide from a Yahoo! meeting was leaked, indicating that the website will eventually be shut down. Bummer, because now I need to figure out where all my bookmarks are going to live! That will be a fun day…NOT.
Flickr
Another social media website that I use, Flickr, has been experiencing some disappointing visitor numbers in 2010 as well. Established back in 2004, and also quickly acquired by Yahoo!, Flickr rose to popularity as one of the best places to share and showcase your photos on the web.
On June 12, 2007, Flickr implemented a user-side rating system to help weed out any controversial photos. Censorship on the web is always a touchy subject, and you can bet your ass that people were not happy with this new feature. Users from Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea were no longer allowed to view photos rated “moderate” or “restricted.” German users decided to protest, and were able to re-gain access of photos rated “moderate.” On June 1, 2009, Flickr was blocked completely in China, and in October 2010, it was reported that Flickr, Facebook, and other social media sites are now being monitored by the US Government Department of Homeland Security.
There has been an increase in competition with photo sharing companies like TwitPic, and YFrog, and apps like Instagram, but Flickr is still wildly popular, and I don’t think they will be going anywhere fast. I think they’ll bounce back.
Bebo
Bebo, which is an acronym for “Blog Early, Blog Often,” combines community, self-expression and entertainment, enabling you to consume, create, discover, curate and share digital content in entirely new ways. Well, I guess it did, until most users up and left the platform after an announcement in April 2010 from AOL Music, reporting that Bebo will be shut down in the near future. Bebo was acquired in 2008 by AOL Music for $850 million. Talk about an investment gone south…
MySpace
After the 2002 launch of Friendster, a couple employees in the company decided to mimic some of the website’s best features, and spin it off into a new social networking website called MySpace. The company blew up and became the most popular social networking website on the internet, and was bought in July 2005 for $580 million by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
It’s weird to think that only a couple years ago, MySpace was a legitimate competitor to Facebook. During 2007 and 2008, MySpace redesigned some of its core functionality and appearance. They added the “Home page” dashboard, among other small adjustments. Once 2010 rolled around, and they still weren’t seeing any improvements, they decided to add some more “glitter”. In November 2010, MySpace finally gave in and integrated with Facebook, allowing users to sign up and log in to MySpace by using Facebook Connect.
Twitter came about in 2006, and has seen immense growth over the past four years. By the end of 2009, two billion tweets per quarter were being posted, and by mid-2010, four billion tweets per quarter were being posted.
While unique visitors are on the uptick for Twitter, total visits in general have been decreasing over the past few months. Earlier this month, I posted an infographic from Flowtown that illustrates this decline in visitors. This may be due to the increase in Twitter applications, many of which do not require you to visit the Twitter website directly in order to use the service.
What’s it all mean?
Basically, it means that you shouldn’t put all of your eggs into one basket. The majority of technology companies follow the model of fast growth, and fast decline. These websites will come and go, and will be replaced over and over again. All we can do is try our best to stay ahead of the curve. As musicians, being an early adopter of new technology definitely has its benefits. Technology is what enables musicians to create and share music in the first place, so it’s important that we are always on the lookout for warning signs and new opportunities in technology.
[Image credit: Click here]
All graphs courtesy of Compete, and all company information courtesy of Wikipedia.
