Netscape Compared To Digg, A Marketer’s Perspective

Netscape. You often hear it mentioned alongside Digg as a social media site, but how many of us actually use the service? Some say it is worthless, while others say it is very useful. From being on Netscape a dozen or so times, here’s what I’ve learned.

Timing

Just like Digg, you have 24 hours to make the homepage. The difference is that after 24 hours, a story is removed from the listing pages on Netscape. This means that when a story is submitted to Netscape, it will only get traffic from Netscape for a period of 24 hours on any of the major listing pages.

Homepage

The homepage of Netscape works a bit differently than most social sites. Like Reddit, you have to work your way to the top of the homepage, which means your story may not hit the very top. The way that Netscape is different is that they control how many stories from each category make the homepage. That’s why you will never see 15 political stories hit the homepage at the same time.

If your story gets to the homepage towards the end of its lifetime, it probably will not hit the top, and you won’t get much traffic at all — in most cases, well under 1,000 visitors. On the other hand, if you have a very popular story that gets to the top of the homepage in an hour, it most likely will stay there for another 23 hours. That can mean thousands of visitors.

Audience

The majority of users on Netscape are more sophisticated than Digg users. Not necessarily when it comes to technology, but they are interested in politics and news. For this reason, political and educational stories tend to do better. Netscape users still enjoy technology, humor, science, entertainment and other topics, but those categories don’t send as much traffic.

Links

The reason why the majority of us try to leverage social sites is because of the links. We hope that they will drive thousands of visitors to our site and hopefully a few of those visitors will actually link to our site. By getting on the homepage of Netscape, you get a nice temporary PageRank 9 link. However, the majority of Netscape visitors themselves will not link unless it is something that they are interested in, such as politics.

Conclusion

If you think if you can get content to the homepage of Netscape that the audience will enjoy, then you should try and leverage it, because chances are that you will get a few links out of it. If you are submitting stories that don’t have a chance to get high up on the homepage, then don’t waste your time.

Neil Patel is co-founder and CTO of ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.