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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - North America

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Digg Acquisition Rumors Take 3

July 23, 2008

Rumors are once again circulating that Digg is going to be acquired, with Google once again named as the potential buyer. A few weeks ago I provided some updated statistics on Digg's clickstream, showing that the site now sends almost as much traffic to News and Media websites as to Entertainment websites meaning that its focus is moving away from sharing videos and photos and turning to news (and not just tech).

How would a Digg acquisition affect Google's property breakdown? I've updated a table that I posted a couple of weeks ago with the top 20 Google properties based on share of US Internet visits in June - this time I've added Digg.com.
Google Top 20 plus Digg.png

As you can see, Digg would rank #13 among Google's top 20 properties behind Picasa.

In June, Digg ranked #35 among News and Media websites compared to Google News' #5 ranking (Yahoo! News ranked #1). Google News received 6 times more traffic than Digg last month, at 2.08% of US Internet visits to News and Media websites compared with 0.33% to Digg.com. Digg received 43% of its traffic from Google.com last month. The #3 downstream website after Digg was YouTube.

In June, Yahoo! Buzz overtook Digg in share of US Internet visits. We recently blogged about growth ofYahoo! Buzz. Here's an updated chart:

Yahoo Buzz v Digg.png

Techcrunch's take is that this acquisition is about Google's iinterest in the Digg algorithm rather than traffic but for advertisers and news and media brands no matter what Google's motivation this spells change for the news and media landscape online.

Tweet Posted by Heather Hopkins at 07:05 AM | (1) | (0)
In Categories News and Media