22
November
2006
|
03:50 AM
America/Los_Angeles

11.22.06: Blogger kings' spitball fight


Something to file under "Who Gives a F-": Jason Calcanis and Nick Denton pissing on each other on respective blogs and comments, with Dave Winer, Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble all chiming in. Somebody wake me when its over.

On Monday Denton said that Calcanis' departure from AOL was not out of loyalty to fired boss Jon Miller but because his performance at Netscape.com sucked rotten eggs.

The numbers are brutal: in the middle of June, before Calacanis overhauled Netscape's front page, the property commanded over 130m pageviews per week. Within two months, traffic had declined nearly 70%.

One of Jason's great strengths is his shamelessness: a willingness to spot good ideas, copy and improve them, fast. He'd offered to buy Digg for $4m, and been turned down; his solution for Netscape was to steal Digg's model, and some of their star contributors. Classic Calacanis.

Except Netscape visitors, most of whom only stuck with the neglected portal out of habit, were the worst subjects possible for Jason's radical experiment. Traffic the week of June 18th, before the Netscape team remade the front page, was 137m pageviews. The following week, as Netscape decommissioned areas such as news and weather, it declined to 115m. The new front page, a clone of Digg.com, went live on June 29. The first full week after the change, traffic had plummeted further, to 72m pageviews. The Comscore numbers, which help advertisers allocated their budgets to different internet properties, mirror this decline.

Calacanis has resigned from AOL ostensibly out of loyalty to Miller ... Valleywag's more cynical theory: he messed up Netscape.com, and used Miller's departure as cover.


And later that a comment from Calcanis:

Another classic Nick Denton hit and run story about a competitor...


Some facts:

1. If you look at unique users before and after the move uniques are down only 22%--which is just fine given that we move the email users over. In fact, the webpage views are up if you take the email users out.

2. We DIDN'T LOSE THE EMAIL USERS... we moved them to another domain inside of AOL (i.e. aim.com). AOL did this because they didn't want to manage the old Netscape email system which was not keeping up with new free email standards (think 2gig free).

3. The email page views are worthless--no one buys email inventory on the web.

4. The reason why the uniques are still high and the page views went down was because the email users do 100's of page views a day--AND WE DIDN'T LOSE THESE PAGE VIEWS... WE MOVED THEM TO AIM.COM.

5. The stats were not leaked--you're talking about COMSCORE. Give me a break.



Feel free to slam me Nick... I know you're having fun taking down anyone who competes with you during your time on Valleywg. First John Battelle... now me. Don't let the facts stand in your way of course.


You should do a blog post on Engadget vs. Gizmodo, Joystiq vs. Kotaku, and Autoblog vs. Jalopnik and how Weblogs, Inc. has crushed Gawker media in the only three verticals we ever competed in.

Or maybe you should do a blog post about how you're always asking your bloggers to out people--I've heard this from three Gawker bloggers so far.

Anyway, good to know that you're still the hit-and-run, facts are secondary, publisher you've always been.

We don't expect anything less from you Nick!

best j


And more opinions from Arrington (Denton's piece a poorly researched hit job), Winer (Maybe Mike is protesting because the new Valleywag is getting a little close to TechCrunch? Nahh, couldn't be), and Scoble the peacemaker (TechCrunch is all about building companies and people up while Valleywag is all about tearing companies and people down. Both functions are needed. If you have hype without anti-hype, no one will believe the stuff that really should be listened to.)

But by now I've forgotten what all this cross-linking is about ... Why Calcanis quit AOL? Apparently, there are some people who care.