Netscape Gets Slaughtered TWX

Editor's Note: Jason Calacanis, who runs Netscape sent the following: "All of the drop was because we moved our HP deal and our mail users to AOL. So, it was expected. The fair comparison will be july--when the site moved over--to August, September, etc." August 2005 unique users were 13.175 million and September uniques were 13.294. His explanation seem very fair, so we will watch and report on August and September.

Douglas A. McIntyer

Netscape's experiment as a blog portal has begun as a failure. Where is goes from here is anyone's guess.

According to Nielsen NetRatings, unique visitors fell from 14.41 million in July 2005 to 7.81 million in July of this year. Traffic had been falling slightly each month over the period, but the large drops came in June when unique visitors were 9.7 million, and then the July plunge.

AOL obviously needs as many of its properties as possible to show audiene growth as its tries the risky transformation from a subscriber-based revenue business to an internet advertising model.

Some of the AOL properties did better. Mapquest had an 11% increase to 46.3 million year over year. AOL traffic was fairly flat at just below 75 million unique visitors.

Time Warner's AOL may have to come up with another formula for Netscape.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at douglasamcintyre@gmail.com. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.