06
2006
Digg versus New York Times Reality Check
Recently I’ve seen some posts that have hypothesized that Digg could be as big as the New York Times online, based on extrapolations from Digg’s reported stats, which surely includes visitors wolrdwide. Heather Hopkins reported last month on Digg’s popularity in the UK. According to the Hitwise US sample of 10 million internet users, Digg ranked at #101 in the News & Media category in for the week ending July 1, 2006. The share of page impressions for the NY Times was 19 times greater than for Digg for that week. If I put the NY Times on the same chart as Digg, Digg’s traffic would look tiny and relatively flat, even though its share of page impressions has grown substantially in the past several months, increasing 51% from February to June 2006. Digg did receive a greater share of page impressions in June than Times Select, the subscriber-only section of the NY Times, and long ago eclipsed Slashdot, as you can see on the chart below.
Additional Hitwise data show that Digg’s audience is quite different from the NY Times:
Firstly, Digg attracts a different demographic audience than the NY Times. For the four weeks ending 7/1/06, 26% of Digg’s users were in the 18-24 age bracket, while only 9.5% of NY Times users were in that age group. NY Times skews much older, with 34% of its users in the 55+ age group. Only 10% of Digg’s users were over 55 in that time period.
Secondly, Digg received 63% of its traffic from search engines during the four weeks ending 7/1/06, compared to 16% for the NY Times, and analysis of the actual terms reveal the differences in how people are using the sites. Very little of Digg’s search volume was navigational, indicating low brand recognition. Take a look at the top 20 search terms sending visits to Digg shown below, and you’ll get an idea of their audience – definitely young and tech focused. Half of the NY Times’ top 20 search terms in the same period were navigational terms like ‘newyorktimes’ and they accounted for 13% of its search volume. Other terms sending visits to NY Times in that period included ‘star jones,’ ‘world cup,’ ‘tony awards’ and ‘obituaries,’ further demonstrating the wide gulf between Digg users and NY Times users.
While Digg is certainly growing in popularity, particularly with the blogosphere set, and its move into more news categories is a good one, it is still an early-adopter site and will take some time to gain traction with mainstream internet users.
Will be interested to see what the numbers look like for four week periods after Digg v3 has some time to percolate.
Digg was MOSTLY a hi-TECH /Software News site – the type of technology that would be more appealing to a younger crowd.
NYTimes had the advantage of being a COMPLETE news site – which is the direction DIGG is going in.
Also the ALEXA toolbar is usually used by youngish techies, thus biasing any comparisons
in terms of the “navigational” search terms
people who put those terms like “Digg.com” or “NYTIMES” in Search engines are NOT the most savy of searchers – they usually are the MSN crowd, with perhaps a few Yahoos.
Digg is more a Google – type crowd, who would Virtually NEVER put that in Google search purposely unless they were analyzing the SERPS
Why dont you have a Times it link on your Blog?
Thats becuse Digg is the new King of News agregation that draws traffic to your site and others .
I often wonder whether all the people singing the praises of Digg have ever spent time there – judging by the comments, I’d put the demographic at more like 80% aged 12-16.
Sad that Slashdot seems to be declining, as the commentary there is an order of magnitude more reasoned than that found on Digg. Maybe I’m showing my internet age (11 years… anyone want to buy a 6-digit ICQ number?..) but in my opinion Digg’s motto should be “Everything old is new again” – there is no wisdom to be found in crowds.
Well this post just shows 2 things: 1) about half of the info I could get with Alexaholic, Google Trends, Microsoft AdCenter and BlogPulse – as I have published recently in Webmetricsguru at http://www.webmetricsguru.com/2006/06/new_features_in_digg_30_previe.html
But the other half – the Creme de la Creme – can only be gotten from HitWise. For example, the top 20 search terms that sent traffic to Digg – not doable anywhere else.
Good post, Leeann. Digg has an incredibly disproportianate impact on search engines and blog memes — in the tech and adolescent world (I’m a Digg addict myself). But it certainly is WAY far from being a mainstream phenomenon, which is what many would like to believe it has become (including Digg itself and its members). Its massive rise in influence within its niche, though, will likely have some influence on broader discussions and digital media. If I were an online publisher, or a PR person, I’d be watching very closely how this idea catalyst works.
I also think it’s important to note that the behavior of the Digg netork suffers from a phenonomenon similar to the U.S. government: it’s run by and reflects extremists with too much time on their hands. Extreme bloggers. Extreme adolescents. Extreme techies. Extreme fans of strange news. Extreme fans of sensational headlines and stories. And there is a tiny epicenter which jockies intensively for the gratification of being dugg. I’m not saying the Digg system is flawed or bad, because I actually think it’s awesome and helps me discover a lot of interesting content. However, it’s not a utopian democracy — by and for the will of the people. However, it is a practical democracy where a few hand-raisers passionately do most of the work, where their motivations are guided by agenda and ego.
Your set-the-record-straight post also reflects another trend: that discussion memes can go in crazy directions, often fueled by an abundance of free data tools (like Alexa and Google Trends) coupled with half-baked analyses. Free data tools are great, but your post proves they should be used with greater caution. They’re extremely valuable, but they’re mostly good for demo-ing the higher-grade pro tools, or just discovering early-stage insights and directional trends.
Good post which reflects the difficulty of crossing from the early adopter to the mainstream market segment.
Many web2.0 collective filtering and aggregation websites are having difficulty monetising their traffic. Early innovator traffic is very fickle and not prone to purchase everything they sample.
The same with A-list bloggers, who have difficulty monetising their brand asset with the early adopter segment where they are popular.