Is Propeller Headed for a Landing?

Can you believe it’s been nearly two-and-a-half years since the social news site Propeller went live? It’s even more amazing that the “new” Netsape launched almost four years ago! In case you aren’t familiar with the story of Netscape and Propeller, here’s a brief history lesson. When now Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis sold his blogs to AOL, he became the product manager for a new social news site within the AOL network named Netscape. Yes, the same Netscape that in the early Internet was a Web browser. Soon thereafter Calacanis left AOL and Tom Drapeau took over as Netscape Director. We interviewed Tom shortly after he accepted his new role.

Tom noted that Netscape had a crew of “scouts” who were paid for, “several activities, including posting stories, engaging in thoughtful conversations in comment threads, and keeping an eye out for spam.” This made Netscape a bit different than Digg although Netscape was called a clone of Digg since day 1.

In September 2007, Propeller took flight and the social news site took the place of the Netscape site. Many wondered if the new location might hurt the overall ability to brand the social news service. While lots of people called Propeller a Digg clone, many (including myself) had high hopes for the service.

I haven’t spent much time on Propeller in a long time. About two weeks ago I received a referral from Propeller and decided to take a look at the site and see what was up at the social news aggregator.  It looks like content on Propeller falls mainly into two categories: political and spam. Each morning since that referral, I’ve looked at Propeller to see what type of content is making their “main page”. Most of the stories seem to be political in nature and those stories appear to come from some of the larger blogs and news outlets. The other stories listed on the home page seem to be self-promotional, many are spammy and loads of blogspot blogs that are basically scrapers.

Here’s an example of what was listed on the home page this morning:

As you can see, it only takes a tiny number of “props” to make the front page. I have no idea what type of traffic Propeller drives these days and/or if there are any SEO benefits to a front page listing. Additionally, here are some of the stories on the health & fitness home page:

It’s almost like no one is tending to the house anymore. Compete shows traffic continues to decline each month over the past year with a 20% drop in January and a total of 250,000 U.S. visitors.

So what will happen now with Propeller? Will they upgrade the engine and get the ship moving upwards or is Propeller coming in for its final landing? Leave your thoughts in the comments.