Yahoo Buzz, a Digg-like service that launched on February 25, is now nearly three weeks old. We asked Yahoo to share some of the data from those first two weeks.
The big benefit for publishers is that top Buzz stories are linked from the Yahoo home page, which turns a firehose of traffic onto a story. When those stories hit the home page there’s a good chance that the linked site will have a record day in traffic. Yahoo says they’ve sent 16 million visitors to outside sites in those first two weeks, and they’ve gathered data from some of the linked partners:
- Salon got so excited about a February 28 link from the Yahoo home page to this story that they issued a press release - they had 1 million unique visitors that day, the most ever to the 12 year old site.
- US Magazine was linked from Yahoo on February 27, and had the second highest traffic day ever. 32% of visits that day came from the Yahoo home page.
- Huffington Post reported 800,000 unique visitors from a Yahoo-linked story
- Smoking Gun, Portfolio.com, Dallas Morning News and Imaginova all reported significant traffic increases after links from the Yahoo home page.
- Sugar, Inc. sites have had nearly 1.8 million unique visitors sent from five different Buzz stories on the Yahoo home page
Yesterday we were linked from the Yahoo home page as well, for this story by Duncan Riley on Japanese ISPs blocking file sharers (see image above, click for larger view of how the links look). The link went live at 5:45 PM PST as one of the bottom four links in the news box (these send less traffic) and was up through the day. Despite the fact that yesterday was a Saturday (slowest traffic day of the week) and that it was up only 1/4 of the day, we had our highest traffic day ever and over 1,000 comments were left on the post. The traffic almost brought our site down, but the guys at Media Temple kept it alive.
Yahoo is still ramping up the number of links it puts on the home page from Buzz, and is being careful about the potential to flat out nuke websites with all the traffic they can send. But it’s clear that a link from Yahoo.com blows away anything Digg or any other competitor can offer. That will keep the Buzz publishers, who must be invited into the service, paying attention.
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A rising star — 400M netters behind it.. more super than digg, to be.
OK, so they sent a bunch of traffic to other sites. That’s great for you, Huff. Post, etc… but how exactly does this help their business make more money?
David, I think it’s all part of their overall strategy to open things up at Yahoo. The new search products play into this as well.
When Yahoo! launched buzz I knew it’d be killer for just this reason. People inside Y! talk about the “Yahoo firehose,” and it’s true. They can basically drop a million users in your lap at the flip of a switch.
Every content producer on the web wants that kind of attention, which means every content producer on the web is going to be submitting their stuff to Buzz.
Everyone chides Yahoo! for releasing “me-too” products, but here’s the thing: they have muscle, they just don’t always know how to use it. You have to play to your strengths which, in the case of Yahoo!, means lots of cash and lots of users.
So, good on them. They’re not the little guys any more — it’s stupid to play by little guy rules.
Yahoo! seems very resolved to continue to impress the world. And it’s time to do so!
cool. at least, one thing yahoo excels at. . . news stuff.
…and what if Microsoft buys Digg??
MSN.com + Digg = Huge traffic as well, not as big as Yahoo but still…
or…what if Microsoft buys Mixx instead?
Despite the haters, the Yahoo brand and ‘firehose’ influence is still very strong. I think opening things up is a great strategy, but I’m curious to know the quality of traffic that they send. Do you guys measure that? Are these people dropping through, or do they come back? If the million visitors they fire your way are of high-enough quality and return, this is an amazing opportunity and publishers would be foolish to ignore this.
I never understood why some people where counting out Yahoo… Being one of the top 5 internet properties and a brand name right up there with Google, Microsoft, MSN, etc.
Not to mention some of the excellent properties that they have that have yet to be “re-launched” like Delicious, Flickr etc. I think we have only seen the top of the ice berg of what is coming from Yahoo this year! Flickr video… could be real big!
@Shafqat i wonder the same thing myself. while it’s nice to have the Slashdot/Digg effect for others, if the folks clicking through aren’t “qualified leads” then what’s the point (other than having to worry about a crashed server)?
Is Yahoo! Buzz the next Digg? Maybe not. I’ll admit when I swing by Yahoo! and they have a video on the front page above the fold…I click it. Imagine if Google put something on their page front and center…what impact would that be?
@Shafqat:
It can’t be any worse than digg users, who are mostly geeky white males between the ages of 18-26.
The downside might be that Buzz visitors are less tech-literate and so, for example, are less likely to write about or link to your content. That’s the value I see in getting on digg, even is the visitors are mostly worthless: the tech set pay attention to it.
@Jesse didn’t ABCNews and Netscape learn the hard way though? what makes Yahoo different?
@David:
Well, empirically the difference is that it’s working. Were there any stories similar to the ones Michael talked about above for Netscape? Already Buzz is doing better.
Even so, Yahoo! isn’t trying to reappropriate another brand. They’re leveraging the power of the Yahoo! homepage to drive people towards Buzz, a separate property. With Netscape is was this all-in-one thing — the page with the eyeballs was netscape.com itself, and then suddenly everything was different.
@David & Jesse: Its hard to compare since I have no idea about Yahoo traffic. I guess for sites like TC, the nerd/techie set may be the target audience, so Digg traffic has a higher value here. But for non-tech publishers, I would imagine Yahoo traffic is awesome. Even a small conversion ratio could have a significant impact on repeat visitors in the future.
So Mike, you decide? How do you value traffic sent from Digg vs traffic from Yahoo?
Does anyone know what this is written in? I know Y! is a big PHP shop.
Jerry Yang talks constantly about Yahoo’s need to be the place were people start their browsing experience on the net. Featuring the best content possible on the homepage is the first step towards that.
I can see why the founders at Digg are looking to sell. Their value is declining. I am curious to see how MS will view their deal with Digg in light of YahooBuzz and their ” pending” buyout of Yahoo. ( yeah, I don’t see how Y can not sell)
@M. Arrington
It’s good to see a story about something that doesn’t bring all the teens in here hammering porn, the way Duncan’s post about Japan’s ISPs did. That was pitiful Sure, it brought you a ton of traffic but did nothing for TC image. Wonder if Charlie Rose or some of the networks would find it appealing on TC. The comments should have been shut down after about 100 or so. It was very ugly.
Dave Binkowski,
Keep in mind, not everyone uses Digg or is aware of it’s existence. While this technology is not new to you, it may be new to a fair share of the community members at Yahoo. I predict far more people use Yahoo mail than the number of people who digg stories. If you’re a Yahoo mail user that never dugg a story and you go to the Yahoo homepage one day and see Buzz, a fresh and interesting new feature, you might stay a little longer.
Also, this is part of Yahoo’s business model, they are a dynamic company and a lot of their success is derived from acquisition or adoption of new features. Buzz may not help to build significant revenue for the company, but it may help maintain a steady revenue. Keeping loyal visitors interested and attracting new ones means introducing new features.
I notice TC’s feedburner reader stats has dropped about 20k since Friday. Could this be connected with Duncan’s post?
The key to profit in sending traffic to 3d parties are revshare agreements.
Also, I’m shocked that salon has never done a million uniques in a day. That almost seems laughable, and there’s no way I would believe that if it weren’t for the press release.
Yahoo! Buzz is sending some serious traffic. 800,000 to Huffington Post is amazing.
Regarding the yahoo firehose….
How do you guys think Slate stays in business? They’ve got a deal where a few times a week Yahoo puts their stuff on the front page…and drops a few million readers in their lap. Same with MNS.com. This is old news for the big players. It’s sad to hear Salon rave about it…since they’re supposedly Slate’s West Coast rival.
Yup, Yahoo is probably gonna beat Digg soon. It looks WAY better than Netscape’s Propeller.
Julian nailed it.
Yahoo audience is many, many times bigger than Digg and other services, also they’re more diverse (not just techies as other posters mentioned).
I think this is part of their advertising strategy.
When advertiser see how much traffic Y! can pump to their partners, they’re gonna give their advertisement dollars to Y! and their partners.
@JosefVirek: Why would MS spend hundreds of millions to buy Digg for the purpose of putting content on MSN.com? They might buy Digg for the user base and advertising, but if they wanted something like Yahoo Buzz or Digg, they’d just have spend a fraction of Digg’s cost and code it themselves, just like Yahoo did. You buy digg for the eyeballs, not the technology.
@Richie Cunningham
I think Feedburner has been acting up all this year, a lot of my blogs went down by 25% or more one day only to come back couple days later. This happened to me too on zedomax.com yesterday.
This will send to Yahoo! even more $$$…
Good work for them….
@20 - I agree. In fact, I guarantee you the masses are not aware of Digg. Techies know about Digg and assume they represent the universe but Yahoo! Buzz will most likely swamp Digg in no time. Digg may continue to be the epicentre of tech/Web 2.0 stories but news, sports, finance, politics, etc. will be the domain of YB.
Regards,
George
I couldn’t find Buzz on the yahoo homepage except for a tiny text link. Hopefully they will integrate the stories on the homepage, or increase the number of news stories on the homepage. In general, I think Yahoo’s homepage can be so much more and is the starting point for everything they want to accomplish financially.
I dont think there are many sites out there that could hold up to a million uniques in one day. That’s like the slashdot effect times a billion. Still, that is a real impressive number. I imagine that a story has to be pre-approved by a Yahoo employee before it hits their front page though, otherwise there would just be too much potential for abuse.
Yahoo! keeps kicking butt.
http://ezapples.com/Home/tabid.....fault.aspx
Mike,
Congrats on the increased traffic. Just to clarify: are you saying Yahoo released traffic stats because “We (TechCrunch) asked Yahoo to share some of the data from those first two weeks.”
Or was it just standard PR for a product launch?
Can you share any other traffic stats from links to stories that didn’t hit the Yahoo front page?
Thanks,
Kevin Heisler
Executive Editor
Search Engine Watch
Buzz up the story
lol
@27….what is that term i learned at Stanford….i keep forgetting….oh yeah..it’s “Synergy”.
I’m glad to see Yahoo making some progress, this won’t change things ownership wise, Microsoft will end up with the company, but it’s nice to know that they can still generate some excitement.
@16, yes, Buzz is written in PHP.
even though the service sucks - it’ll still achieve a large enough critical mass by simply being linked and seen from Yahoo’s main page
…the service can’t lose
Y should try linking to themselves ….
At least Yahoo is active! More than traffic on my site I like people interested in what I’m blogging. But I’d try it one day.
@ # 37
You must be one of the punks here last night. Use your own posting name you idiot.
Well these stats rell us nothing about how Buzz is doing. Putting a link on Yahoo’s Home page and saying it comes from Buzz and sending lots to the links site is nothing. I’ve been looking at Buzz from its launch - and frankly its like a desert. Almost nothing original or unusual and most of the so-called Buzzs are from a very small range of pretty uninteresting sites. The buzz figures for each story are pretty small, the flash links at the top of the page are almost unusable and generally I don’t think it works.
wooooow.You are beautiful. Seems saw you before. Did you ever posted your profile to a celebrity and millioniare dating site called myrichmatch..com.? I just saw your profile yesterday on that site.
The publisher sites should now embrace the OpenID 2.0 and get ready for Yahoo users, who already get their OpenIDs, to comment and hang around their sites easily for more time. // Buzz does not provide a place for comments probably just for this reason
@ Idodialog
Good point. These stats don’t tell us anything about how well Buzz is doing. They simply show how much traffic one can expect when being on the front page of Yahoo.
However since the payoff is so great, these stats do provide an incentive to post on Buzz.
another buzz for nothing at Yahoo. Show me the $ from thirdparties who are b buzzzzzing…
Buzz the leather donut then. =)
http://www.leatherdonut.com
The downside might be that Buzz visitors are less tech-literate and so, for example, are less likely to write about or link to your content. That’s the value I see in getting on digg, even is the visitors are mostly worthless: the tech set pay attention to it.
Until people can actually submit stories, we cannot call this a true social news site. It will be just high-traffic sites getting even higher traffic.