Wowio Deathwatch

I reported on Wowio's traffic numbers according to Alexia a month ago, citing they had dropped to levels seen when they were closed for the month of July. I just checked this morning, after reading D.J. Coffman's recent update about his continuing problems with Platinum, and Wowio's traffic is now down to its lowest ever...

Since Alexa's numbers are not going to be 100% accurate, I thought I'd try to check some other measures. According to Google's trend analysis, web searches for the term "wowio" are at their lowest level since mid-2007...

(Point B in the graph above corresponds to July 31, when the site re-opened after being closed for a month.)

I also noticed for Google, Yahoo and MSN that there are NO sponsors at all for the search term "wowio." I can't compare this against past history, but it can't be a good sign, as it suggests (but by no means confirms) that no one is willing to pay a single penny to be advertised on a search page associated with Wowio.

Additionally, blog posts discussing Wowio have been trending downwards since the summer, according to Technorati...

Now, none of these measures is definitive, certainly, nor do they point to any concrete conclusions, they cumulatively suggest that Plantinum buying Wowio was a bad move all around. The original Wowio owners must be fraught at seeing their company go down the tubes so quickly* and the folks at Plantinum have picked a decent chunk of debt with no appreciable increase in revenue and no saleable licenses. I was really hopeful Wowio would do well when I first heard about them in 2006, but once Plantinum became involved, I think anyone with any realistic expectations knew this wasn't going to end well. From my perspective, this looks to me like Wowio's about ready to hang up the "Going Out Of Business" signs and try to close up shop before the end of the year to avoid a bunch of tax issues for 2009. Even if somebody could come up with a game-changing plan for them, I think the site and the name have too much baggage at this point and they'd be better off starting from ground zero.

* Unless, of course, they were exclusively shooting for a dot-com-bubble approach, and were hoping it had been long enough since that bubble burst that someone would be gullible enough to fall for it again. Which, apparently, Plantinum was. If that's the case, those original Wowio owners must be falling out of their chairs laughing.