Propeller is all but dead, did you notice?
Widely touted as a viable competitor to Digg propeller.com caused a storm when it arrived on the scene and stole some of Digg’s top users with promises of $1000 a month salaries back in 2006.
Fast forward 2 years and the site has a new domain and things don’t seem to be going well.
I don’t pretend to know what goes on inside Propeller but I do know how much traffic landing on the front page can send, and it really isn’t very much. In fact getting on to the top of the Propeller front page recently has been sending 500 visitors maximum and that is pretty poor.
In comparison hitting the front page of Digg sends 10,000 to 100,000 visitors.
Currently a submission 19 minutes old with 8 votes has made it to the top of the front page. Pretty easy to replicate that if you have 9 friends and an instant messenger account.
Have you got a different story? How much traffic does propeller send your site?
Post category: Social Media Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 14 comments below, or add your own!
I’ve been recently offered a frontpage on Propeller for $70. I hesitated but didn’t take the deal in the end. I guess I did a good decision.
I tried Propeller for a piece of linkbait I created. I thought it was really good so it deserved some attention. The traffic sent was really poor.
It’s not worth your time, not even if you do get on the homepage. Some friends said the visitors convert or click on ads but I haven’t experienced such thing.
Let’s stick to the big sites we know and use smaller ones just for some link love.
Sure. That 7 PR front page linklove is nothing to fight for. I have seen some of my dead pages jump to googles page one as soon as I submit to propeller with the right tags.
I submit to Propeller mostly for backlinks at this point. It’s nice to get a couple hundred visitors and possibly pick up a couple feedburner subscribers, but I definitely don’t base my livelihood on a Propeller front page.
I too, gave Propeller my attention after I saw all the mad props it was getting (“props”… heh… see what I did there?) only to get little from it.
Makes you wonder what happens though, doesn’t it? I mean, they looked like they could hang with the Bigs. Curious.
For me, Propeller is all about the links. You can easily submit all of your own articles, blog posts, and domains to Propeller and unlike most social news sites, Propeller gives anchor text dofollow links. It is a simple quick way to build deep links over time.
As for the frontpage, I have only hit it once and it was a long time ago. I don’t believe it was over 500 uniques either.
Who cares about the traffic most social media traffic is rubbish anyway no-one buys anything. Use the links to leverage your SE positions. I you get the right tags on propeller you can get indexed and ranked rather quickly
Why propeller dont send traffic is ..
propeller has 2 kind of users
1) contributors who need PR juice for their sites .. they don’t care about what others are submitting
2) Moderators who want to get rid of totally automated spammers and junk content.
The visits you get by being of front page is nothing at all. .
But the Page Rank boost you will get is insane .. Thats why Propeller is not actually dead
Propeller has not given more than 400 visitors when i reached the home page many times.. And you are right that Digg is much high traffic provider.
You need to make the top 2-3, that will get you 1.5 to 3.5k every time. A lot of the authority has passed over from Netscape now and propeller has more authority with the search engines then any other social bookmarking site.
Also it sometimes shows up in analytics as lots of differnt sites.
I am on front page now and the traffic is terrible. Digg is so much better than propeller. I made 1st page on dig and got picked up by cnet and got about 70k over a few days. Propeller has greatly disappointed me. Lets see what it does for the backend. I can’t complain though the site that made it to the home page is 18 hours old. And you never know in march Pr fairy could show up anywhere anytime, wish me luck.
I had no idea this was the way it was. I have now changed my views.
I recently signed up for propeller since it was one of the “big ones” for bookmarking and social linking, but it give me trouble every time I try to log in or try to add content.