I would imagine there must be several dozen Digg clones out there. Most would argue that with so much competition and a formidable runaway leader, it would be difficult for a newcomer to break through. Having said this, there was a ton of buzz surrounding Mixx at Pubcon so I spent this week checking out the site. In a nutshell, Mixx allows you to discover “personally relevant” media/news and interact within networks that you create based on interest and location.

This week I take a look at Mixx, by the numbers.

The Beginning:

• Mixx beta launched September 17, 2007
• Mixx is owned by Recommended Reading, Inc., a privately-held company based in McLean, Virginia
• Fully launched in October, 2007
• Chris McGill, CEO and founder of Mixx, had previously been the General Manager of Yahoo News and more recently the VP Strategy at USA Today.
• Management team consists of industry veterans with deep Internet, news publishing and online content expertise including former executives from AOL, USA TODAY and The Associated Press

The Traffic:

• The number of people visiting the site: 126,607, up 185.6% month over month
• Of the total share of visits, only 8% are regulars
• The number of pages an average person views on each visit; 7.0. This compares to 4.9 for Digg and 3.7 for Reddit
• The number of minutes an average visitor spends on a site during each visit: 5:21. By comparison, it’s 2:25 on Digg
• Percent of global Internet users who visit this site: 0.0095%

• Alexa traffic rank:
o Yesterday 5,504
o 1 wk. Avg. 4,896
o 3 mos. Avg. 16,852

• Mixx.com users come from these countries:
o United States 50.8%
o United Kingdom 6.4%
o Canada 4.9%
o India 3.9%
o Israel 3.3%
o Australia 3.0%
o Romania 2.7%

• Mixx.com traffic rank in other countries:
o United States 1,151
o Australia 1,156
o Israel 1,306
o South Africa 1,569
o Serbia and Montenegro 1,745
o Romania 2,092
o India 2,167

• Top Mixxers include: LizBlaze, TunisianGuy, FatLester, Greg Davies, StandardsDT DiffeeOnlie, Webaddict, Chris789, Edith01

The Financials:

• The company is almost certainly funded but won’t yet disclose any details.
• December 4, 2007, the Los Angeles Times announced it has taken a small equity stake in Mixx.
• To date, there are no advertisements present

The Demographics:

• According to Quantcast, The site attracts an average household income of $60k, slightly male slanted, 55+ crowd.
• Only 19% of total users are in the sought after 18-34 demographic
• 16% make over $100K
• 14% attended grad school
• 75% of audience have Children Ages 6-17 in Household

Did You Know?

• The site describes itself as taking the best features of Digg, LinkedIn and My Yahoo.
• Techcrunch story on November 24, 2007 spoke about an unexpected surge of users began flocking from Digg.com to Mixx.com
• Mashable have nominated Mixx for the Open Web Awards in the Social News & Bookmarking category
• Mixx have a Twitter account
• Users have created the mixxingbowl, a forum site for Mixx

• According to Mixx, one month into the launch:
o More than 10K tags have been entered into the system
o More than 80% of users have set up YourMixx pages to keep up with the topics that matter to them.
o The average YourMixx page contains more than 10 tags and categories
o Private groups, both personal and for business networking, are springing up by the dozens

• Features Mixx is working on:
o Toolbar
o Facebook application
o Mobile Mixx version, to include an iPhone version

What I’ve enjoyed most about Mixx is the clean look, extensive personalization features, tags (you can create your own if they don’t exist), groups for both personal and business (this is such a time saver!) and the fact you can always see who voted against your posts. They’ve also given equal footing to all forms of content including photos and video. Mixx was clearly built by people paying attention to what Digg is missing. I’m not sure what the future holds for Mixx but I really enjoyed the overall user experience.

What about you, do you enjoy Mixx? Tell me about your experiences.

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