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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK

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Google News versus Digg

November 15, 2006

I am a regular listener of the Daily SearchCast and yesterday's episode was particularly good. Danny Sullivan and Dave Naylor make a killer combination for good laughs, excellent rants and, of course, search industry news. Yesterday, Danny talked through a case study of Google News versus Digg (you can find more on this on Danny's personal blog, Daggle). Danny does a good run down of the differences in the traffic from the two sites and on the podcast Danny and Dave had a bit of a rant about the level of maturity of visitors to Digg.com.

I did a bit of digging on Hitwise to see how Digg and Google News compare in where they send their UK visitors and the difference is pretty stark. Essentially what I found is that Google News is much more popular than Digg. No surprise there. However, what's perhaps more interesting is that Digg's clickstream data reveals that the site is much more about video and games than news.

Digg became the #1 News and Media - IT Media website last week, overtaking The Register in share of UK internet visits for the first time. To give you a bit of a comparison, here's a quick ranking of some other news aggregators in our News and Media category:

4. Yahoo! UK and Ireland News
6. Google UK News
22. NewsNow
43. Digg.com

But looking at where these sites send their traffic tells a very different story.

The following chart shows the share of upstream visits to News and Media websites from these aggregators. (I've included The Register to drive home my point.)
News Aggregator Comparison.png
So what's my point? Digg's traffic is not very newsy. Digg accounts for a smaller share of visits to News and Media websites than The Register. Given that The Register is not an aggregator makes this particularly interesting.

Here's another interesting comparison - Digg.com received a 56% larger share of visits than Reddit.com last week, but Reddit accounted for 27% more visits to News and Media websites. So, where does Digg send it's traffic?

Last week, 13.75% of Digg's downstream visits went to News and Media websites. 5.8% went to the News and Media sub-category, IT Media. Digg sends less traffic to News and Media websites than to websites in the Entertainment category (primarily video and games sites). 22% of downstream visits from Digg.com last week went to Entertainment websites. The following table shows the top 20 clickstream websites for Digg.com last week.
Digg Clickstream.png

The top downstream website from Digg.com last week was YouTube, receiving 4.36% of Digg's traffic. One More Level, a Flash based games site, accounted for 16.83% of upstream visits to Digg.com last week. If you click through on the Digg icon on the One More Level website, you will see the site's entry: "shoot as many bottles as you can in 15 seconds".

Whilst Digg.com can still be an important source of visits to websites, and has the advantage of allowing any site to be "dugg", the site seems to be less about news and more about online videos and games.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 11:53 AM | (0) | (0)
In Categories News and Media