Twine Confirms Traffic Drop on ReadWriteWeb, but Spins it Out of Control

ReadWriteWeb just wrote about my last post and relayed Twine's response, which in a nutshell is that they saw a 20-25% traffic drop but that it doesn't matter because they are all focused on version 2.0 which will free their traffic acquisition model from its dependence on Google rankings.

Couple of immediate comments (also see comments on RWW site):

Compete.com shows a 85%-90% drop, and so does Quantcast. They tend to be reliable in quantifying % changes and even Twine has endorsed them in the past. Twine has a huge incentive in downplaying this, since a drop of the scale Compete.com shows could lead to a withdrawal of investors' support. So, until I see actual proofs, my assumption is that the 20-25% drop claim is a misrepresentation.

Re: Twine 2.0 as the savior, RWW calls out the spin of the company, writing that "once again Twine is hyping itself up". According to Compete.com, 92% of visitors were passersby, meaning not repeat users. That confirms that Twine 1.0, as lots of commenters have pointed out, failed to make repeat users of the 100,000s of visitors coming to the Twine site from Google. Now that Google has pulled the plug on the bulk of that traffic (that reminds me of Geosign, which went from over $100M in revenue to zero, literally overnight a few years back - there is another analysis to conduct on that Google practice), Twine 2.0 might well achieve great conversion, but traffic-wise it will likely have to rely mainly on buzz, and much less on the search giant. Which means they are starting from close to zero, i.e. some user following minus the badwill they've accumulated from many folks like me plus now the lack of confidence in management created by the traffic drop (I'd expect a little better as an investor if I had put over $20M in the thing).

As RWW rightly points out, Twine can't afford any mistake now. And yet they are already trying to take us for a ride, again. Given that and the past inability of the company to integrate feedback and create positive buzz, I'm not holding my breath. In the meantime, Twine sure wins the title of "king of spin 2009".