It is not easy being No.2. As we hinted yesterday, Reddit, the news voting site that was bought by Conde Nast in 2006, is making the code behind its site open source. (The code can be found here). That means anyone can now make their own Digg-like site. Not that there has been any lack of Digg clones in the past. Reddit’s move to open-source its software is merely an acknowledgment that it is already a commodity.
The truth is that it is not the technology that makes sites like Digg or Reddit successful. It is the people who use them. And the more people who use them, the more useful they become. It is a classic, network-effect, winner-take-most market.
And the winner here clearly is Digg (as long as it doesn’t alienate it’s core users), despite valiant efforts by Reddit, Mixx, and others. In May, Digg had more than 20 times as many U.S. visitors and pageviews as Reddit, according to comScore. Even if comScore is undercounting, and the relative gap is only half that much (which is what data from Compete suggests), it is still pretty insurmountable.
(Note that comScore is almost surely undercounting Reddit. It measures only 300,000 unique U.S. visitors in May versus 6.3 million for Digg. Whereas Compete measures 2.4 million versus 24 million, respectively. That is why it is more informative to look at the relative gap than the absolute numbers in this case). Here is a comScore chart comparing pageviews. See how flat Reddit has been all year.
“The truth is that it is not the technology that makes sites like Digg or Reddit successful. It is the people who use them.”
That is absolutely true. The thing is they could have sold it on hotscripts and made some cash though. I guess they don’t want the money.
@Erick - Dude! Does that mean I win a TC shirt?
I don’t completely agree, Erick: There are other social news tools available for the taking; none, though, with the pedigree and backing the likes of Reddit / Wired / Condé Nast.
Beyond putting the source out there, it looks like there’s plenty of docs and even some kind of plans for implementation support. If that’s a commodity, please point out where I can grab proven code, tools, docs and a company to back it up.
Shouldn’t this also represent a new, radically transparent Social News platform? This isn’t like the open Digg clones; this is actual reddit code. I’d imagine this will be helpful to keep cabals from dictating the Front Page and help make gaming the system become a dying sport.
Making their rich set of tools available - and available to be examined, changed and used as organizations see fit - is an unprecedented Win for the business of Journalism. I’m looking forward to using it for a number of applications.
Reddit may have a smaller userbase, but thats why its such a great news site.
Digg is utterly embarassing when it comes to both submitted links and discussion.
I think the only fair comparission to reddit is slashdot.
Of course Digg has more users, but to be fair, I’m not sure Reddit has a directly comparable audience to Digg. I’m not sure they’d want to, either.
Why wouldn’t these also be graphed against Yahoo Buzz?
I agree with #5. The audience at reddit is vastly different from digg. In pure numbers digg wins. But have you ever looked at the comments on any given story and compared reddit to digg?
It’s like comparing myspace (or facebook) to linkedin.
Why doesn’t somebody grab the sources, and make a virtual host mod to do reddit Ning so people can point their own domain to the server and it registers a new virtual host for each one in Apache httpd.conf?
You could grab TONS of users that way.
I think I might do it. Just to get the users, then I can dump them back to my social networks.
Reddit Ning. Of course I will not use the reddit trademark.
Digg has *already* alienated its core users. But that’s ok (for digg, anyway, not for those of us who loved the old digg) because they did it by bringing in a mass audience. That volume made up for the loss of the core, geeky crowd.
Who, incidentally, landed over at Reddit and Hacker News.
Do you speak of the same comScore that says TechCrunch is 60% Female….sounds accurate.
I love reddit, one of my favorite sites, but I don’t understand the point of this. Someone give me a good reason for them doing this, other than “because they can” or “because they’re cool” or “because OSS is cool”.
You can already create your own reddit, and make it private if you want t keep it between friends.
Although I personally enjoy it, I’ve always thought Reddit’s layout and structure was two simple and plain for mainstream users.
What looks like a “clean” interface to most tech-savvy users sometimes looks cheap and low-budget to mainstream users. If they ever want to go mainstream, like Digg, they need to make the interface a little more visual.
I’m not sure digg really has more users. There’s rumors of millions of users but there is certainly no sign of them. There must be close to a 90% dead/dupe/spam account ratio.
I’m also not entirely convinced traffic is the right metric for determining who’s #1. Digg drives more traffic to a site but the traffic is worthless. It gets more traffic but that traffic just passes through from search engines on their way to somewhere more worthwhile.
Reddit has a smaller userbase and less traffic but an overall higher quality. And then there’s Slashdot, which is still as good as it ever was, can still force a server to it’s knees, and hasn’t lost control of it’s userbase.
I suspect a large part of digg’s traffic relies on search engines. When the search engines realise *their* users aren’t getting value from digg pages - most of which could be summarised as a page full of idiots cut & pasting ascii art, memes and especially hating and attacking something - they’ll slip further down the results and a significant chunk of the traffic’ll just vanish overnight.
i do agree reddit design sucks
no visual appeal
why are they giving away their code?
i thought purpose of the tech sector was for innovation not to be copycat clones
I’m curious why the writers at Techcrunch never reference Quantcast stats.
Digg is signed up for their tracking service which makes their stats pretty close to exact:
http://www.quantcast.com/digg.com
Reddit isn’t signed up so their stats need to be taken with a grain of salt:
http://www.quantcast.com/reddit.com
That wasn’t in the explanation video…
http://youtube.com/watch?v=uo4O4T-7BiE
Doesn’t anyone care about transparency in their democracy anymore?
If you have constructive comments for the design of the Reddit website, why not put them here:
Reddit Feedback
From http://venturebeat.com/2008/06.....en-source/ :
“Huffman also noted that since Reddit was acquired by Conde Nast (the parent of Wired) in 2006, the site has grown to 4.4 million month uniques and 120 million monthly pages views. He also notes that 23 percent of the sites’ users have signed up since it rolled out its user-created Reddits in January.”
As usual, comScore/compete stats are no better than Alexa. What’s impressive is how much credence people give information sources that have been so conclusively shown to have no bearing on reality.
While they may or may not have the largest userbase they do have a very active community, which is surprising considering their not very appealing design. To me this means that the people hanging there are more conscerned about the content (which is supported by the rather high comment count), or that they (ab)use it for SEO purposes like most other digg-clones.
I look forward to see where this lead as I am looking for a solid alternative to pligg that seem to dead in the water for my swedish website. Hopefully it will not be to long before it become useful for the greater audience
“as long as it doesn’t alienate it’s core users”
M$ controls what gets posted on digg, if that isn’t reason enough to drop that alienated site in favor of reddit, I don’t know what it is.
Until reddit becomes alienated as well.
If it wasn’t for slashdot sucking in the UI department I would stick there but, hey, it really sucks!
@11 (hey, Sean)
They’ll have to answer why they did it; here’re some of my thoughts w/r/t why I’m glad they did. Perhaps there’s some overlap:
I can work their platform into my own apps.
Reddit’s a well-proven code base. It being opened - rather than “just” an API - makes it more attractive to me and the people I for whom build products
I can ask their core developers and now-widening community for help with these implementations
you can already create those things. They’re great (we use them on parade.com already), and they go to reddit.com. and they do the things the reddit team has time to implement.
Parade works with hundreds of newspapers. Some of them may prefer the convenience of using reddit.com; some may prefer to use reddit features on their own site. They can now do either or both.
“And the more people who use them, the more useful they become. It is a classic, network-effect, winner-take-most market.”
I’m sorry but social news is not a classic winner-take-most market (whatever that is). To the contrary, adding more people to a social news site only adds value up to a certain point. Once critical mass is reached, additional people have the effect of tabloidizing the content. As numbers continue to grow, the value that the site had is cannibalized in favor of an ever-lower common denominator.
Will social news ever amount to anything more than The National Enquirer of the internet? Certainly not if Digg is the only player.
why go open source? This article alone was worth it.
50% of the the real value in Digg and Reddit is in the comments. Sometimes, the same holds true to TC.
This is cool and all, but http://www.pligg.com/ gets my vote over Reddit for open-source “democratic” content.
“And the more people who use them, the more useful they become.”
My personal experience has been otherwise. I used to like Digg, when it has fewer people, and it was tech focused. The comments were more intelligent. But now, there is so much nonsense similar to other stupid forums like 4chan. The value lies in the quality of comments, where reddit wins over digg.
Actually, reddit is kind of growing too… I guess I’ll be moving to hacker news soon
@20
In a site where the phrase M$ prevails and firefox is one of the most supported browser I highly doubt that if microsoft had control I’m sure they would instill moderation
put a nice little (C) microsoft 1987-2008 or whatever the original copyright was
and call it Live News
I dont think I appreciate the value of always trying to be #1. There is a lot of value in the long tail, and there are other ways to measure success than quantity. Quality is one, and there Reddit handilly beats Digg.
Think of it in advertising terms: Are you looking for abc1’s, college educated, smart and affluent young people who are usually first movers? Go reddit. Are you looking for 14-year-olds and professional marketing shills trying to make an easy buck? Go digg.
In the long run, the reddits of the world will win. Simply because they are much better at targetting their audience and has a more tight-knit community. This is good for advertising and community and the interwebs as well. We are all heading for smaller and more targeted; the age of the mass market i heading to a close…