Delicious' Decline Already Evident In Traffic, Sharing Trends

The age-old guidance of buying low and selling high has appeared to escape the halls of Yahoo!. If we ignore the Microsoft and Yahoo! acquisition dance of 2008, which ended up in Yahoo!'s staying independent, but losing dramatic market capitalization, search market share, and accelerating an employee exodus, both voluntary and involuntary, it's still clear the company intends to wring all the remaining value out of its vestigial pieces before selling - effectively promising low to no returns on every deal.

Yesterday's news leaked that Yahoo! had plans to kill or spin off a number of Web services, including Delicious, Alta Vista, MyBlogLog and others. Given the abandonment and mismanagement of these properties, this is not too surprising.

AddThis Shows Decreased Use of Buzz, Delicious In Last 90 Days

Alta Vista's mismanagement goes back more than a decade. In 1999, I wrote a story (this is pre-blog, so I'd love to say "post") on Internet Valley's Web site about how Compaq was not leveraging Alta Vista after they acquired Digital Equipment Corp. (See: Warning: Compaq is On the WWWarpath) The site is a shell of its former self, once being my go-to search site.

But Delicious is what has everyone up in arms, as the company was among the first Web 2.0 darlings, and is still widely used, as the Web's definitive bookmarking site. I've personally tagged more than 3,000 items in the last few years, most of them capturing external links to the blog. Yahoo! has managed to take a site with a deep bench of fans, considerable use, and make it obvious they would love to give it away. It's not even clear if anybody really works on it any more, or if it's just being maintained by the company's techies.

Compete.com Shows Traffic Freefall at Delicious

On this background, both Web traffic stats and sharing statistics from third party sites show the party long since ended at Delicious. Compete, whose traffic graphs are anything if not suspect, still manages to display some trendlines right, showing a decrease in traffic of nearly one half in the last year. In parallel, AddThis, the social sharing site, shows decreased Delicious bookmarking, down by 14% in the last three months, the fastest declining site of its kind on the service.

AddThis Displays Delicious Dive To the Bottom of the Bookmarking Pile

The moves Delicious has made have been odd or delayed. The long-awaited "New Delicious" was way behind schedule, and recent bumps made sharing to external services even more difficult. It's as if the company wanted to punish the users it had left.

If you want to get a fantastic return on a sale, the best time to sell is when you don't have to, when things are going fantastic and you have real momentum. Yahoo! has essentially telegraphed to the world that it wants to ditch Delicious to someone, anyone. But the catch is, its users already started ditching it themselves. Buy high, kill.... sell. That's the wrong order of things, Yahoo!.

Social Networks' Traffic Stabilizes, Facebook Nears Yahoo!

Facebook Up Slightly, MySpace and Twitter Flat to Down
Despite November being nearly half over, the monthly traffic statistics from October have just been released by Compete.com, and it looks like there are no major surprises in the social networking arena. Despite the recent improvements and continued hype, traffic to Twitter.com decreased slightly, by 2 percent, month over month, tracking at the level it saw in June of this year, and lower than the previous three months. Facebook, the #3 site overall worldwide, behind only Yahoo! and Google, climbed more than 3 percent, to almost 129 million, while MySpace stayed steady around 50 million unique visitors (15th overall).


FriendFeed and Posterous Decline - While Twine Plunges
Where one saw more movement was in the lower tiers, as FriendFeed continued its descent following the Facebook acquisition, shedding nearly 7 percent of visitors, dropping below the 700k mark, from a one-time peak above 1 million, and Posterous dropped more than 12 percent, showing just under 1.2 million visitors. Twine, which once peaked above 2 million, is now just over 120,000.


Yahoo!'s Slow Decline Comes as Facebook Rises Toward the #2 Spot
Facebook's slow but steady growth actually has them looking less in the rear view mirror, toward companies like Twitter (who scored 23 million uniques vs. Facebook's 129 million) and more at the big gun right ahead of them - Yahoo!, which continued its slow descent, dropping just over 1 percent, to 135 million unique visitors. In fact, one more month with the same trajectory would have both networks tied at about 133 million visitors, so we could see a change in placement come November.


Google's Position at #1 Remains Unchallenged (Shown With YouTube)
Unsurprisingly, Google reported in at #1, again, counting almost 150 million unique visitors in the month, according to Compete (which in my opinion is probably low). In addition, the company's YouTube subsidiary tracked just under 85 million unique visitors, good enough for the #5 position worldwide on its own. GMail continued its climb to another 9.3 million visitors, up 98% from this point last year.

Surprisingly, GMail's position is more than 3 times higher than that of Hotmail.com, which has even been surpassed by Apple's Me.com MobileMe e-mail offering. Me.com sported 3.5 million visitors, growing 98% year over year, contrasted with Hotmail's 2.5 million, which decreased 7 percent, according to Compete.


LinkedIn Stays Hot - See Versus Twitter
Interestingly, during the recession, with high unemployment, LinkedIn.com traffic increased 3.3 percent in the month to 15.5 million unique visitors, up 89% on the year. Monster.com, the massive job site, tracked in with 41.5 million unique visitors, good for #20 in the world, up 47% on the year.

Some other sites of note:

• Apple.com traffic tracked at 21.4 million, compared to 15.5 million for hp.com and 13.4 million for Dell.com.
  
• Digg.com traffic decreased less than 1 percent, up 57% on the year, good for 43 million uniques.
  
• Technorati.com traffic was flat, with only 2.8 million unique visitors.

Disclaimer: Compete statistics are known to be imperfect, but they are always interesting.