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Recently I came across a Compete article about how “Internet Rock Stars Drive Traffic,” written in September. It used Pownce, Truemors and Mahalo as examples and tried to draw conclusions about referrers were working best for each of these sites.

The most interesting part of the entire article is that it used a dynamic traffic graph to show the statistics for each of these sites. Now that it is November, quite a few things have changed.

And since hindsight is 20/20 lets explore the real source of their growth.

Paint By Numbers

Pay attention to the graph. Except for Mahalo, after an initial spike both Pownce and Truemors saw a huge downturn in traffic. In fact, Pownce is trending downwards and Truemors has leveled out. While the numbers are great (in an absolute sense) for all of these sites, the traffic trends imply that it was something other than the product that was responsible for their meteoric rise.

Mahalo

Mahalo is an outlier because it is doing a couple of things right at a huge scale. It generates large numbers of keyword heavy, SEO optimized pages about popular content. When you spend all day writing about Lindsey Lohan and the Writers Guild Strike, you are going to drive large lots of organic search traffic.

It’s a similar to going to Google Trends everyday and putting out a post covering each of the top 20 topics. You are riding on the great big head of Internet traffic.

More important than that, we cannot forget that Jason has rock star status amongst tech media. The launch of Mahalo was preceded by more media coverage than most sites ever see (much of it good). Jason is a Sequoia “Entrepreneur In Action” and is close with almost all of the big guys (even if they don’t always like him). This personal brand was almost certainly the reason that Mahalo took off the way that it did. Once launched, we all know that the Internet is a momentum game.

Pownce

Pownce was launched on the back of Kevin Rose. It got several free Digg front pages in the first weekend (along with a few more over the next few weeks). Whether you love him or hate him Kevin Rose is a known quantity amongst the digerati and the entire blogosphere was abuzz about the new product.

This celebrity endorsement and the surrounding hype made up the majority of Pownce’s user base. One proof to this is that as Kevin Rose let go of the reigns a little, traffic has begun to dive. More than dive, trend downwards. This tell me that the product isn’t holding up its end of the bargain.

Truemors

A am a big fan of Truemors but I know that had it been launched by anyone other than Guy Kawasaki it would have flamed out in the first month. Guy is the best case study for how products like this are launched. He promotes Truemors unceasingly, whether its on his blog, twitter or at conferences that he attends.

I would be surprised if 50% of the new traffic arriving at Truemors isn’t a direct result of Guy’s ability to evangelize. Truemors is fun and useful if you are a part of the community, but as most of the detractors have noted — it’s not a huge innovation in the space.

Web 2.0 Roundup

What can we learn from this? Never underestimate the power of personal brand to launch a product. A good question is whether any of these products would have seen the light of day of their founders had not been there to prop them up. My thoughts? Probably not.

The Internet is a momentum push and the hardest part is getting the initial kick start you need to drive traffic forward. These “Internet rock stars” prove that with an average product, you can do quite well if you are able to make it over this first hurdle.

Now the question becomes whether personal brand can really create a profitable business. Maybe we’ll know in 6 months.

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