Apparently since Digg has been making efforts to extend from tech to other types of news, there have been more stories from mainstream media and fewer from blogs on the homepage. In March, I did a post showing that Digg sent more of its traffic to Entertainment websites (YouTube and Flickr in particular) than to News and Media websites. However, when I checked the data today, i noticed that is changing.
Looking at Hitwise clickstream data, I charted visits from Digg to various categories. I used monthly data to control for the iPhone 3G launch.
The top category visited after Digg is still Entertainment. However, by only a small margin (3%). In June, 21.34% of visits from Digg went to an Entertainment website compared with 20.67% to News and Media. Visits to News and Media websites from Digg are up 16% year on year compared with a decline of 20% to Entertainment. As illustrated below, the gap between the two categories is closing rapidly – down from 50% a year ago to 31% when I last blogged this in February to 3% in June.

Visits from Digg to News and Media websites were up 16% year on year in June. The Print sub-category received the largest share of visits to News and Media sites from Digg, receiving 9% of Digg’s traffic and up 47% year on year.
There is a rumor circulating that Digg might be acquired by a print media brand and that this is driving the change in stories that are profiled on the home page. Whether or not this is the case, for those looking to benefit from Digg’s powerful traffic distribution, it is interesting to note the change.
Note – My colleague Heather Dougherty did a post on the possibility of Yahoo! or Google or Microsoft buying Digg in March.