Digg’s been busy lately adding new features—some loved, some not—but they seem to be having a positive effect on overall. In June, comScore estimates the site brought in 8.8 million unique visitors in the U.S alone, up 31 percent over the preceding three months. Update: The July numbers just came out, and Digg’s unique U.S. visitors went up to 9.5 million.
What accounts for the change all of a sudden? Well, by Digg’s own admission, once it introduced the Diggbar it saw an initial lift in visitors just as a result of people passing around short links. And it’s been getting even more aggressive on that front lately, having to reverse itself at times.
But it’s not just the Diggbar. The site launched a decent search feature in April (which always helps generate more traffic) and Facebook Connect in May.
Its recently-introduced Digg Dialoggs with people like Al Gore, Trent Reznor, and Marissa Mayer have also been popular. Users can suggest and vote on questions of be asked during a video interview conducted by Digg founder Kevin Rose.
What do you think is the biggest source of new visitors to Digg?
Diggbar did help in the boost of traffic along with facebook connect but peronally I’m not that fond of digg. the website is too slow and the content to be put in simple words is “lame”. The whole atmosphere of social networking on digg is quite lame. I prefer reddit more than digg maybe because the sub reddits play much more important role than front page stories.
Reddit is an absolute eyesore though. Every time I have attempted to use that as a replacement for Digg, I just get lost in a sea of similarly formatted type and go back to the land of Bury Threads, Bacon Posts and Pedobear/Ackbar Ascii known as Digg.
i started out at digg but soon got sick of it. Also the recommendation engine sucked. As far as reddit is concerned yeah it’s eye soaring but once you get the hang of it you realize it is the simplicity of that site and vast area of content that makes it more indulging than digg. You can see that time spent on reddit is always more than digg.
Ah, the good old recommendation engine! I think Digg should get the “scientist” teams from Netflix competition and improve the recommendation engine.
Could you elaborate? Why did the Recommendation Engine suck? I looked at it (a beta version) several months ago, and it looked good to me then – it updated in real-time and made recommendations that seemed right/good.
What was it you didn’t like about it? Thanks.
Digg is sizzling, the digg bar is an annoyance that most people have disabled. Their backtracking on their own decision to not show it to all visitors makes them look shady if not untrustworthy.
Following Zack and Scott…
I’ve about given up on Dugg and Raddit because the game seems to be voting down any submission that is from an outsider.
That, and the people that see a good link will re-submit an identical submission and submit to their friends to get their submission on the front page.
The funny thing for me is that I submitted a client post which was buried as someone resubmitted the link to go to the home page. I don’t care, my client got traffic.
What I’ll have to do is just send my links that will go to page 1 to one of those kids that plays the game all day.
What I dont understand about these “power users,” as they are called on Digg, is why do they want to end up on the front page? Does it matter if the story that I submit, or the story that someone else submits, end up on front page if the story itself sucks? I thought the whole point of Digg, and Reddit, was to submit stories and let people vote on them if they like them so more people would read them, not to make MrBabyMan or AverageDigger or MSaleem (I cant remember any other power users at this moment) popular?
Who gives a shit who submitted a story, as long as we all like the story? Besides, why do people compete to end up on the front page so many times, do they not have anything better to do?
Jason, stop for a second and think about this. Why does it matter if something gets frontpaged? The amount of traffic a frontpage article gets is absolutely huge. Depending on the amount of advertising on your page, and how long you can keep them on your site once they’ve finished the one article, a front-page article on DIgg can be worth anything from a few hundred to several thousand dollars.
Your next question will then be, why do the submitters care? These power-users aren’t getting the money from this traffic, they submit stories from hundreds of sites, so why does it matter to them?
The simple fact is that people who get a lot of front-page stories are more likely to get more front-page stories. There’s thousands of websites out there who are happy to throw money at someone to submit their article because it’s 90% more likely to get to the front because of the person submitting it. Not all their submissions are paid for, in fact only a small % of them are, but the ones they don’t get paid for are the ones that build their reputation. And then they throw in the paid-for submissions that are generally lower than normal quality but nobody really notices.
Well that was longer that I intended. But the point is, it’s all about money.
And for those people saying that the power-user era is over; you’re wrong. The shouts have moved to twitter but the culture of blind-digging hundreds of articles just to stay in the group has continued unabated. The code that was added to detect and protect against bots worked for a while but they just use smarter bots now and keep very quiet about them.
Traffic generation is the single most important money-making enterprise on the web. Sites like Digg that can generate an incredible amount of traffic cannot possible stay honest and uncorrupted because there’s simply too much money at stake. There’s always some clever person who can figure out how to tilt the playing field in their favour.
Power users on Digg don’t exist anymore, you can’t recommend stories to your friends. The “shout” command has been discontinued.
Are you serious? I still see MrBabyMan, msalleem and other power users hit the frontpage every day. I left for almost a year because stuff like that, and have just recently gone back, only to see them continually hit the front page.
At least with reddit you’ve got a chance at making it to the front page, whether you’re a power user or not.
Digg has been aggressive in their pursuit of partners, high-volume sites integrating with Digg through widgets, and a heavy dose of promotion through Twitter.
It seems that all of their recent actions have been geared towards increasing new visitors as well as increasing the number of pages viewed once visitors come.
Google trends shows a downward trend:
http://www.goog...m/trends?q=digg
your looking at a 3 year period…his refering to 3 months
http://siteanal...e.com/digg.com/
Here is a 1 year period, no uptake within the last 3 months:
http://www.goog...=ytd&sort=0
agree, digg is going backwards at a rate of knots, comscore is junk
You’re also looking at searches. Trends website search gives a less drastic reading:
http://trends.g...eo=all&sa=N
It may just be a bounce from curiosity seekers. There has been enough negative press to send viewers Digg’s way. As the old saying goes, bad press is better than no press.
I’d like to see Digg move into a direction that would bring back a larger following. It is possible to do that and be profitable.
hmm, i think i must started using digg from now to be a famous blog, are the other social network that same good like digg? please share
http://www.reddit.com
*cough* reddit blows *cough*
*cough* Everything on digg today was on reddit two days ago *cough*
With all the changes digg has done it certinly looks like they are mounting up for a sale?
I don’t think anyone wants to buy them. The audience is so fickle, juvenile and anti-advertising no company like Google, Microsoft or Yahoo would want to get near them.
Plus, a lot of their content and post replies are very non-PC…and big corporations probably don’t want to be too closely linked to the things people write. They also know that any sort of comment/thread censorship would also instantly kill the site so I can totally understand why no one is interested in buying them.
one of the biggest sources may also be techcrunch wrapup posts, that dont have any real news in them …
Wow, I think I’m slightly annoyed that this is even up for debate. There should be NO confusion as to why Digg’s unique visitors are up. It is almost all entirely due to Digg hijacking the Digg shortened links and driving all that traffic from content instead directly to their landing pages which = a unique visitor to each hijack. This trend will not keep pace as even Diggers themselves are not sharing Digg shortened links as much now on Twitter.
In reference to the comment that Digg is trending down on Google Trends at: http://www.goog...m/trends?q=digg this just shows that there is less and less interest in Digg in the consumers mind. Google trends is built off of search data from the consumer end and Compete is just reflecting US Traffic Data even if it’s worthless hijacked traffic.
If we’re going to act like Compete data is serious and something can be extracted from it, let’s look at it like this. Look at the Compete graph for the not-so-shocking monthly visit rise for Digg and then view the second metric of “total” visits. You’ll see it plunged in the last two months. More uniques, less repeat visits, less engagement.
Enjoy the slow burn Digg. TechCrunch knows you’re not growing, they’re just trying to be nice and keep in your good graces.
I apologize I thought Compete numbers were being used instead of ComScore. ComScore is generally more solid on numbers. I have to admit though, Compete is more interesting in this case to point out what is really going on here…
For my own sites, I’ve seen no evidence that ComScore is more accurate than Compete or Alexa. ComScore has one of my sites at 3 million uniques per month. I wish. It gets ~1/10th of that. Compete and Alexa both estimate that site’s traffic at 200-250k uniques a month which is much closer.
Why reference Comscore when actual traffic stats are available for Digg?
http://www.quan...st.com/digg.com
Techcrunch do this a lot, constantly referencing comscore when the actual directly measured quantcast numbers are available. I don’t understand it.
It’s easy to understand, techcruch “writers” are a bunch of hacks.
the only thing digg was ever good at was tearing down john mccain and sarah palin this past election season. digg just isn’t a reliable source for news – unless you like to click links that take you to crazed radical blogs written by freaks
digg does this, but if you want that amplified 10 fold go to reddit.
I think Digg is getting popular day by day because of the fact that every one is looking to move out of hardware restrictions. People are not limited to one or two machines now-a-days they need to often work on different computers so, it has become a sort of trend to go online.
With Digg giving a new offering now people dont mind switching to it, with the capability to transfer all the stored content from different platforms. People like to see refreshing change quite often now and if Digg continues to provide it, people will stick to it longer.
Sonal Maheshwari
USourceIT your single source for all IT needs
Guy Goma? Is that you?
Uh… do you even know what digg is, Mr Spammer?
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Digg was my first Web 2.0 site and I used it for a few years. I hated the Digg bar and switched it off, likewise I uncurled digg urls.
The skewing of the frontpage was my main cause for disatisfaction. Sames names, low views frontpage.
I use popurls now in preference, visiting digg for somethign interesting as I see it.
I agree with you- Popurls is the easiest and simplest way to stay up to date on the days happenings and even get a good laugh along the way…If I see something of interest to me then I’ll click and read on…the genuine aggregator
I’m not sure the brief length of this post was worthy of a “Read More >” link.. There’s goes two tenths of a second I’ll never get back.
I can’t wait for some of the new features that Rose talked about recently. It’s such a pain to have to go through the long submit process.
I think the biggest source is “word of mouth” between Internet users – once any service gets decent amount of users we deal with snowball effect.
Digg will eventually die out.
High school/college is out for the summer.
considering they stole the idea for digg dialogg from college kids over at http://www.tervoo.com , i’m guessing they steal other ideas from other poor kids and increase their traffic.
Digg has been and still is one of the leading traffic generators for my blog, I consistently use them.
Commenting or contributing to digg is just tremendous waste of time.
The fact Digg often bans users for having political opinions in opposition to Obamabots doesn’t help digg’s popularity.
Plus, I think people are sick of all the yuppie-fanboys that constantly flock in to spam the comments with stupid meme krap or the same lame store products, repeatedly; meanwhile, anybody with brains and true wisdom or unique posts gets buried or labeled a troll; they get robbed of submitted stories, then they’re jumped over by mrbabyman clones or obvious major media shills.
Stories on digg are always on TV at the same time, so it is obvious that major media networks use digg as their proxy to spam their pathetically vacuous stories, to steal other vacuous stories, and to push their anti-American/pro-Globalist/pro-yuppie/pro-ignoramus agendas.
So, why the hell should one even bother using digg, especially when it is nothing but artificially preserved crap?
DIGG = DEAD! Stop writing about this “has-been”.
Even though “digg is dead” for most of us (or at least for us who read TechCrunch), you have to admit that they’re getting more traffic since they’ve made changes to go “more mainstream”.
Love digg. I used to have them as my home page for my phone, but something happened about a month ago to where it’s not showing any stories, just advertisments. Clean it up digg!!
no doubt they are trying to change their model and I wish them well but no sense is that they have missed their window of opportunity.
Digg’s CAPTCHA form SUCKS! I have to try about 3 times and then I get disconnected from their server.
Doesn’t matter. Digg still sucks and sucks bad. It’s nothing but a propaganda machine that quickly squelches any point of view the editors disagree with.
Ashton Kutcher is the final nail in the coffin. my 2 cents
I am new to digg/reddit/yahoo buzz/etc. I scanned the variety and settled on Digg, they have a diverse base they draw from. Reddit does too, but you have to search, there’s so much duplication there that it just gets annoying.
Half of the buzzups are Yahoo articles, how boring.
thanks for the article!
BILLY MAYS HERE.
Do you think diggnation (video podcast) affects their traffic at all?
The show has been a bit more “high profile” lately with Ashton, Fallon, etc … being featured.
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How about:
1. bing now directs users to digg
2. the growing mass of unemployed/underemployed now losing their lives on digg
3. it’s summer, school’s out