BusinessInsider.com has a chart stating that Digg received 17.4 million unique visitors in August 2009, easily eclipsing other social news sites. Its dominance in the social news sphere brings to mind another company…
Top Search Engines According to a July 2009 comScore Search Report:
- Google (65% market share)
- Yahoo! (19.6%)
- Microsoft/Bing (8.4%)
- Ask (3.9%)
- AOL (3.1%)
Top Social News Sites Based on Unique Visitors in August 2009:
- Digg (17.4 million)
- Yahoo! Buzz (7 million)
- Propeller (800,000)
- Reddit (670,000)
- Mixx (660,000)
Digg’s dominance in the social news sphere is not unlike Google’s dominance in the search sphere. Digg’s strong community and constant roll outs like Facebook Connect, the DiggBar, and constant Digg Dialogues appear to be having a positive impact on the site’s popularity.
Amusingly enough, Yahoo! Buzz is like the Yahoo! Search of social news. Poor Yahoo! — always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Most surprising to me is how disappointingly Reddit appears to be performing — are they the Ask of social news sites? I remember a few years ago when it was all about Digg vs. Reddit, and now this chart depicts Propeller is beating Reddit in unique visitors and Mixx nipping at their heels (though I suspect the unique visitors for Reddit are incorrect–the number seems a bit low for them, don’t you think?). In any case, Digg fans must love seeing their favorite site spanking Reddit while Reddit fanboys are probably scoffing and saying they prefer the site’s “intimate” community.
Love them or loathe them, but clearly Digg is doing something right since they’ve managed to outshine their competition and seem to be establishing themselves as the predominant social news site on the web today. What do you think the other social news sites need to do in order to better compete with Digg and attract more users to their sites, or do you think that, much like with Google, Digg’s only going to get stronger?
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10 Responses to “Is Digg the Google of Social News Sites?”
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You know, I was a huge fan of Digg up until about a year and a half ago when I first really started using it heavily. That is when I first started to noticed their "heavy handed" editing (ie nuking) of diggs from less established sources. Also their recent addition of "sponsored diggs" has me very upset because it's basically like taking a TV channel with really great programs all day and placing an infomercial right in the middle of prime time.
I love the site and the concept but, like mashable.com, I find that their attempts at "messing with the formula" have me visiting the site less and less.
I hate their "Sponsored Diggs" as well and agree that there have been some positive and negative changes to the site lately. I gotta say though, I've noticed some heavy handed editing on Reddit too and I think they're worse about it (I heard that they wiped out top Diggers who used the same name across both sites and banned their accounts from Reddit).
I don't consider digg as Google of social Media. Google stands for quality and it would be bad if we compare digg with google.
Digg now a days has become a dump of garage, there are only few stories worth reading, i think digg is not able to maintain high quality as it used to do in Past.
[...] Is Digg the Google of Social News Sites?, 10e20 [...]
Yeah, I think Digg is the "Google" of the social news world. It's the most popular of all the social bookmarking sites.
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[...] I came across a post last month by Rebecca at 10e0 called Is Digg the Google of Social News Sites?. [...]
This is a great analysis. I thank the author personally for this tremendous job. Search Marketer's always tend to do Social Media Marketing, but without much knowledge on social media websites. Sometimes, the research and analysis like the one which is discussed in this blog post, emits limelight on the traditional knowledge and emerges with new set of data which the world will not be aware of. Thank you so much for sharing such a great knowledge of yours with the rest of the world.
Great Post..
Thanks
According to the figures it certaincy is! Congrats to Digg!