As Digg becomes more mainstream, so are the headlines linked to on its homepage. The once tech-heavy site long ago expanded into other categories such as entertainment, world, and business news. But that change is finally hitting its home page, either because Digg is attracting more mainstream users who are Digging more mainstream stories or it is using other (algorithmic) methods to point its firehouse in the direction of mainstream media. (Comscore shows 15.4 million unique visitors in May, and 6.3 million U.S. visitors in June).
Hitwise released some data today indicating that Digg now sends nearly as much traffic to entertainment sites as it does to news and media sites. As the chart above shows, 21.3 percent of its traffic goes to the former, while 20.7 percent goes to news and media sites. A year ago the gap between the two categories was a 50 percent gap, now it is a 3 percent gap. The traffic sent to entertainment sites as a percentage of Digg’s total outgoing traffic is down 20 percent, while the traffic it pushes to news and media sites is up 16 percent (although both are down since April).
This data confirms a trend that Allen Stern at CenterNetworks noticed last week. Namely, that UK newspapers in particular, like the Guardian, are showing up a lot more often on Digg’s homepage, displacing more familiar tech sites such as Ars Technica, Engadet, and Gizmodo. (When I checked today, about half of the stories on Digg’s homepage linked to traditional news sites). He also speculated whether this meant that Digg is trying to sell itself to the Guardian, which bought the blog network that owns PaidContent last week for an estimated $30 million.
That seems like a stretch, but showing that it can drive more traffic to traditional media sites would certainly make Digg more appealing to any potential acquirer. There has been no shortage of acquisition rumors over the years, but it would make more sense for a semi-neutral technology company like Microsoft or Google to make a bid than a media company with ts own properties to promote.
Could this be due to changes made to Digg’s digg algorithim?
Gosh I love digg, what a rockstar type of site… look at a web 3.0 story I saw on digg here http://www.gothamtechminute.blogspot.com
Being able to change your algorithm to attract the attention of potential sponsors via traffic drive is a neat idea. Next headline could be “Digg is Pushing More Traffic To Pizza Coupons of Pizza Places Near Their Office Building”.
With great power comes great
responsibilitiesmunchies.This could also have to do with the mainstream’s sudden realization that Digg, Reddit and the rest of the gang exist. More “Digg it!” buttons are proliferating on newspaper.coms than ever before, and most online re-designs make sure to implement them in some way or another.
It will be a clone of Yahoo Buzz is it keeps going in that direction.
Digg didn’t change their algo just to appeal to media companies, they just suffer from the inherent weakness of crowd-sourcing: your site is only as good as the crowd. As Digg’s user base has changed, the new deemed relevant by the users has changed. My opinion is that Digg is getting “dumber”, but it all depends on your perspective.
could it be that #1. Those “mainstream” media sites actually have content that people are interested in Digging #2 the “mainstream” media providers have figured out how to use new media aggregation and distribution sites?
I find both of these to be encouraging to the continution of good journalist “trusted” content creation.
Digg gets people interested in news which wouldn’t be otherwise.
I think this will bring Digg more inline with the other news sites, ie, its first page content will not differ that much from the other big news sources.
Maybe this will break up the techy cliques that exist on there… allowing other news to get to the front and other people to get recognition for their newsworthy diggs.
After this post, many traditional media sites would start taking a serious look at buying Digg….
digg’s value to me drops by the day, cannot fathom its value to anyone else, but money has a mind of its own
digg is killing small sites when they’re on front page
As a former professional money manager of technology equities, I used Digg a lot to keep a pulse on the everchanging technology space. They dig up stuff that you would never find on mainstream sites.
digg is popularing most of sites especially arstechnia …..
Nuthin algorithmic about this dynamic. Just media companies evolving and taking advantage of social syndication. I belong to the former and am celebrating the evolution and the revolution.
Good this is better. Link to actual articles written by news reporters, not to a blog that links to a blog that link to a top 10 list.
Yes, this is naive - but I think that if they are manipulating their algorithm for this purpose then obviously digg no longer reflects the opinions of the community they have built, but rather how much money they can milk from it. — I guess nobody’s perfect… after all, they are a business - but it sure would be a slap in the face.
You need to stop using Comscore for your data, particularly when REAL data is freely available if you bother to look for it.
From Federated Media’s (very outdated) Digg advertising page:
http://www.federatedmedia.net/authors/digg
Yes, Digg left the Federated Media fold last year. But if they were doing 150M pageviews per month last year, then what are they doing this year? That’s probably significantly more than the 15.4M uniques as tech sites tend to do 1:6 unique:pageview ratio based on anecdotal observation (ArsT) using real numbers, not Comscore crap.
So 15.4M * 6 = 92.4M, which is WAY less than last year’s conservative 150M figure.
You also need to update Digg’s funding information as it appears in CrunchBase, as they have have a 3-year, $100M deal with MSFT. That’s quite a bit more than the $11.3M that’s listed, is it not?
Yep I would have to agree that many of Digg’s front page news is from major news sites. That’s why I continue reading Digg cause I get all my news in one place.
This means that these days with digg you are a small fish in an even larger ocean - ie it’s harder to to get yourself noticed. If you want to bring traffic to your website you need to get yourself a group of friends…
Yeahh. Here is some more useful info about digg and it’s success …
http://rapidsharex.info/index......amp;fl=all
I never thought that Digg is a powerful internet tool for boosting traffic. I’ve been ignoring it for so long now. I never noticed its true function.
Guess it’s time to get acquainted into it.
the more you digg, the more traffic you get.
i all way read in digg and go that make me go to many good web site
http://www.mythailove.com