PollDaddy Traffic Soars, Releases Ratings Widget With Possible Digg Competitor On The Horizon

It’s no secret that bloggers love their polls — they’re a great way to increase user engagement, and sometimes you can even get some useful data from them. But most people probably don’t realize just how popular these polls really can be. PollDaddy has just released some of its latest stats, and they don’t fail to impress: the company is now serving 430 million poll impressions per month, with a reach of over 74 million people worldwide, giving it a Quantcast rank equivialent as the 22nd most visited online service in the world.

That success is due in no small part to PollDaddy’s acquisition by WordPress’s parent company Automattic last fall. Bloggers could embed PollDaddy into the WordPress blogs (as well as other popular blogging platforms) long before the acquisition, but now PollDaddy is also being included as a feature on WordPress.com, Automattic’s premium hosted blogging platform — and home to over 8 million blogs — that appeals to users who don’t want to deal with having to set up their own blog install. In other words, PollDaddy is now accessible to a much broader audience.

The acquisition opened doors for PollDaddy, helping the site form relationships with large media portals like Fox, NBA.com, and Playboy (the TechCrunch network also uses them frequently). PollDaddy says that its traffic sources are pretty evenly distributed across its portal at PollDaddy.com, its API, and WordPress.com, each of which account for around 33% of new content.

Alongside today’s traffic news, PollDaddy is rolling out a new rating widget (seen above) that lets visitors rate blog rate images, comments, videos, and posts themselves. The feature will be available both on PollDaddy’s homepage and on WordPress.com. This is interesting not only because of PollDaddy’s wide reach, but because of what the company plans to do with it down the line: PollDaddy intends to tie aggregated ratings data into its site PollDaddy Answers, which will surface the hottest images, blog posts, and other content on the web. This could prove quite powerful, potentially turning the site into an alternative to Digg.