Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - North America
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Yahoo! Buzz Catching up to Digg.com
March 17, 2008
This morning I was interested to see the thread on Techmeme's homepage about the success so far of Yahoo! Buzz. The RedWriteWeb story provides statistics on traffic from Yahoo! Buzz to some of the publishers involved in the Beta. ReadWriteWeb claims that Yahoo! Buzz "spells trouble for Digg". What do the figures show?
I was amazed when I saw the following chart- Digg.com last week accounted for only 10% more traffic than Yahoo! Buzz to News and Media websites. To put this in context, Last week, Digg.com received a 75% larger share of US Internet visits. Despite being a much larger site, Digg sends only slightly more traffic to News and Media websites. The chart shows weekly upstream US visits to News and Media websites from Digg.com and Yahoo! Buzz.
However, Digg still accounts for much more US traffic to blogs than Yahoo! Buzz.
The reason is that Digg's traffic is more concentrated to social media, video sharing and gaming news. I did a post on this a couple of weeks ago showing that about one quarter of Digg's downstream traffic goes to Entertainment websites.
I'll reiterate my conclusion from that post - there is likely room for a new entrant in social news media, but the landscape is crowded for video sharing and gaming news. So far, Yahoo! Buzz seems to be following a different path.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 08:45 AM
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Comments
I think you are right. Digg is the right idea but a poor attempt overall. I haven't checked buzz yet. topix seems another potential contender in this market. Theres a lot wrong with it but I find it to be 'stickier'. Polls is an option most of them are missing out on. But I don't think any of them get it right yet. Rather than branding, I think the rule for this market is : the closer you get to getting it right, the more hits you get.
Posted by John J | March 18, 2008 06:18 AM
Arn, sorry for the delay. I wanted to double check the answer with our tech team to be absolutely sure. I can confirm that we are only counting traffic to the Yahoo! Buzz page if the user actually visits the Buzz page. Clicking from the Yahoo! portal homepage directly to the publisher would not count in our metrics.
Thanks for your patience!
Best, Heather
Posted by Heather Hopkins | March 19, 2008 07:49 AM
At the same time Buss is increasing, Digg appears to be decreasing.
Posted by newsblaze | March 20, 2008 03:38 AM
Heather,
Very interesting post. Can you clarify one thing please? from what I know Yahoo buzz currently publishes only stories from publishers like the Times and others. In Digg stories from the Times are competing in attention with much more publisher of small blogs and niche sites. Can it be that since the headlines on buzz are more original to begin with, that buzz generate more traffic to this sites?
Posted by RoiS | March 31, 2008 03:26 AM
I need a clarification.
Are you sure you are excluding traffic from Yahoo's front page? Some buzz stories are linked from Yahoo's front page, which would obviously account for a lot of traffic.
Looking at the link structure, it seems it would not have been counted for buzz.yahoo.com, but I wanted a clarification from you for your methodology.
arn
Posted by arn | March 17, 2008 04:39 PM