AOL to Turn Netscape Site Into a Newspaper of Sorts
In attempt to revive an aging but still well-known Internet brand, AOL is turning its Netscape.com site into a collection of links to news articles, submitted by users and expanded upon by a staff of bloggers.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Netscape relaunch lands mid-pivot for AOL. In January 2006 the company confirmed it was ending its close partnership with Google, forming a broadband-provider alliance, and pushing free, advertising-supported Web properties over its subscription dial-up base. Converting Netscape.com into a user-submitted link feed expanded upon by staff bloggers extends that strategy to one of the last widely recognized names in its portfolio.
The story traveled unusually far on launch day — pickups at CNET, Red Herring, SiliconBeat, paidContent, WriteWeb, TechCrunch and Valleywag, plus confirmation on Jason Calacanis's own blog — and the framing was almost uniformly comparative: TechCrunch called it a 'Digg-like' launch and WriteWeb argued that underneath the social-news clothing it remains a portal, while Valleywag ran a skeptical 'nine signs the new Netscape sucks' takedown.
First-order effects
- Digg now faces a direct imitation backed by a major portal's traffic and budget, with Netscape's residual brand equity pointed at exactly Digg's user-submitted-links format.
- Netscape.com's existing audience gets a new front page built around user submissions plus paid staff bloggers, converting a static portal property into advertising-supported content inventory for AOL.
Second-order effects
- Social-news upstarts like Digg are forced to differentiate on community authenticity against a corporate entrant whose hired bloggers editing user submissions blurs the line between crowd curation and editorial control — the critique WriteWeb and Valleywag pressed immediately.
- The move raises the stakes in AOL's broader free-content pivot announced in January 2006: every pageview on the relaunched Netscape.com monetizes through ads rather than subscriptions, pressuring rivals to accelerate their own free, ad-funded offerings.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, legacy Internet brands survive not by defending their original products but by being recast as hosts for whatever format is currently growing — portals absorbing user-generated mechanics rather than inventing them, a template that tests whether acquired trust transfers to borrowed formats.
The trend: Aging Web portals are retrofitting social-news mechanics onto legacy brands, letting incumbents chase user-driven formats pioneered by startups like Digg.