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It’s safe to say that Digg leads the pack among the popular social news site websites. It’s not my favorite, by I do drop by often, in pursuit of the next best top 10 list.
This week, I’m reviewing Digg, by the numbers:
* Digg started out as an experiment in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson. They wanted a site where “Netizens” could vote on their favorite stories of the day. All currently play an active role in the management of the site.
* Adelson raised $10 million from venture-capital firms for Digg. Adelson and Rose also operate the Web video showcase site Revision3.
* Originally wanted to call the site “Diggnation”
* The site launched to the world on December 5th 2004.
* July 2005, the site was updated to “Version 2.0″. The new “version” featured a friends list
* Version 3.0 was released in June 2006, containing specific categories for Technology, Science, World & Business, Videos, Entertainment and Gaming as well as a View All section where all categories are merged.
* Traffic rose about 330% to 5.6 million visitors in September 07, from 1.3 million the prior September.
* 2 million registered members and 200 million monthly page views.
* Diggnation, which averages 300,000 viewers per show, is the No. 1 podcast in the technology area of Apple’s iTunes Store.
* In July, Digg announced that Microsoft will be the site’s exclusive provider of targeted ads for three years
* Facebook is letting members post news stories to their personal profiles with the click of a button.
* .7% of all stories get to the homepage so it’s actually a somewhat rare feat,
* Digg says about 100 million buttons alone were posted by websites this summer.
* Buttons attract 1 billion impressions monthly, and are now growing at 100 million a month.
* 5% to 20% of Digg’s audience are registered users. The vast majority of the 20-million-plus users, just read the posted stories
* On Sept. 19 Digg launched new features to make it easier for users to find others who share their passions by enabling them to form small groups of “friends” and create detailed profiles.
* Neil Patel has calculated that the average homepage story gets 129 links and up to 10,000-100,000 visitors in 1 hour
* Digg has among the highest concentration of the much sought after 18-34 year olds male demographic on the net
My favorite YouTube Digg themed video of someone applying the Digg rating system to real life:
* It has been reported that the top 100 Digg users controlled 56% of Digg’s front page content, and that a niche group of just twenty individuals had submitted 25% of the front page content
* Diggs 37-person staff work to ensure that artificial methods to get the “Digg this” button clicked on over and over, won’t work.
There is allot of talk that Digg will tweak it’s algorithm in order to permit a diverse number of individuals to digg stories. SEO Diggers that follow a ‘gaming pattern’ will have less ‘promotion weight’. This doesn’t mean that the story won’t be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be needed to make the story homepage-worthy.
Do you have any ideas on how to overcome the participation inequity?
As posted in Stats, Social Media, News.
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