We’ve all seen the usual success story: a 20-something programmer gets an idea, launches a website, and within months he’s already got huge traffic, multi-million dollar exit options and an interview with Wired. All the traffic graphs go straight up without faltering even for a day.

These types of stories have created an atmosphere in which not growing - even for a short period - is considered death. But is it always so? What about all those services that were welcomed with mild enthusiasm or even complete indifference, sinking slowly into oblivion, their traffic graph falling day after day, only to suddenly start rising again? Because, you know, there is such a thing as recovery in the world of web 2.0. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen; sometimes the catalyst is a new feature or option; sometimes the service was simply waiting to be discovered; and sometimes there’s no good reason at all; the tipping point appears out of nowhere.

A word of caution: don’t take the title of this article literally. The five cases I’ve described below are all very different and these companies were never really “dead.” They all share a same basic trait, though: their future looked grim at one point, but they managed to bounce back and continue growing.

1. Pluck [Alexa, Compete]

Pluck was acquired by Demand Media. What do you think, based on the traffic graph above, when did the sale occur? Somewhere around January 2006? Wrong. Pluck was doing quite nice as an RSS reader back in the day, but its popularity stalled in 2006, and at the end of that year they completely ditched the RSS reader idea. But, they were acquired by Demand Media for no less than $75 million dollars in March 2008! What happened? Pluck completely changed their product, focus, and business strategy: they went with a white label social networking solution, and it paid off bigtime in the end. A lesson to learn: changing everything and starting from scratch can sometimes be a good thing.