So What Do You Get For a Propeller Best of Day Listing?

Earlier this week, I took a look at the social news service Propeller and wondered if the service was coming in for a landing. Since that post, one of Propeller’s users submitted the CN story to Propeller and I thought it might be interesting to see what we got from the submission.

The story was posted on Propeller 27 hours ago as of the time of this blog post. The story (as seen below) has received:

• 45 props (these are the up votes)
• 2 drops (I guess these are like down votes)
• 60 views listed on Propeller (not sure if this is how many people visited the page on Propeller or something else?)
• 247 comments!

I count 16 total pageviews in my analytics software using the propeller.com referral domain. This means that nearly none of the people who commented on the story actually read the story. This is an issue for most social news sites – and I think will be an issue for Buzz as well. Outbound traffic is the only real measure for a social news site – the more traffic that the service sends out, the more people want to invest in it.

Interestingly the story became the top listing for best of day and now is listed in the first position for “most popular stories this week” as seen below.

Member “nottooneedy” noted that Tom Drapeau is no longer in charge of Propeller (I haven’t confirmed this). The member also noted, “This place has become nothing more than a cess pool, your bloggy article verifys that fact.. Not much is based on fact here anymore and just as well to read about acid reflux as to read fresh conservatives or liberal heretics racist rants.”

User TimALoftis notes, “Clearly one of the biggest blows to the site was the loss of its Editor, James Marcus who was reassigned by AOL to its AOL News team last Summer. A replacement for Mr. James was not made leaving many to look upon the change as merely a cost cutting move to help compensate for drop in Propellers traffic. Last Fall, the Director for Propeller, Tom Drapeau was also reassigned to other duties within AOL leaving Propeller without leader. No formal announcement was ever made, only a brief reference to it on Tom’s profile page.”

As I noted in my post, the majority of stories I see on Propeller are political (not including the spam). Perhaps Propeller should drop all other content categories and only focus on political content? I can’t picture AOL turning off the service – as long as it generates ad-driven pageviews, and it’s no longer linked from the main AOL properties, it can stay around and just keep generating income.