Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - US
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March 04, 2008
Digg, Stumbled Upon Is there Room for Yahoo! Buzz
Last week, Yahoo! announced the launch of Yahoo! Buzz as a social news site. I wanted to share some statistics on news aggregators and profile Digg and Stumble Upon to see whether there might be room for another social news service.
Digg dominates the category. A custom category of news aggregators has Digg taking half of visits to News Aggregators with Stumble Upon at #2 taking just under one quarter of visits (24%). In February, Digg ranked as the #1 News & Media - IT Media website and ranked #69 in Social Networking & Forums. Stumble Upon ranked #140 in the Social Networking & Forums category based on share of US Internet visits.
Visits to News Aggregators are growing. US visits to Digg were up 89% year on year in February. US visits to Stumble Upon were up 4-fold and to Reddit (the #3 News Aggregator), up 7 fold.
The thing that's interesting about these social news websites is that they are really about celebrity gossip, gaming news and video sharing. (I'm not saying that Lindsay Lohan's wardrobe choice isn't news, but...). I am basing this conclusion on clickstream data for these websites.
Digg and Stumble Upon provide a brief summary of the story and link out to the story source. Therefore, looking at downstream traffic from these websites gives us a good idea of the types of stories people are reading. The following chart shows the share of downstream traffic from Digg and Stumble Upon to Entertainment, News and Media, Blogs and Social Networks. Notice that Entertainment is the top category receiving visits from both websites.
Let's look at how important these websites are as a source of traffic to News and Media websites. Last month, Digg accounted for 0.034% of visits to News and Media websites - and Digg was far and away the leader among the websites in my News Aggregators custom category. Reddit accounted for 0.0097%. By comparison, Google.com accounted for 14% of visits and Yahoo! Search for 4%. As illustrated in the chart above, Digg and Stumble Upon send more of their traffic to Entertainment websites, YouTube and Flickr in particular, than to News and Media websites. Also, last month, the top News and Media website visited after Digg was the UK's Daily Mail tabloid, indicating that celebrity gossip is driving the News and Media traffic.
So is there room for a new entrant. Probably. But the competition for traffic on celebrity gossip and video ratings is steep!
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 07:57 AM
Posted to News and Media
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Comments
Yeah its true that DIGG dominates
Posted by: pravish at March 6, 2008 12:46 AM
StumbleUpon also drives large quantities of traffic from its toolbar. This would seem to be a major skew in Digg's favour using the above analysis.
Posted by: LifeDesignSEO at April 14, 2008 08:21 AM
