Peter Alguacil from Pingdom contacted me on Friday about a comparison he did with Digg and other social media sites. In the comparison he included Digg, StumbleUpon, Slashdot, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, Newsvine, Fark, Dzone and Sphinn.
Peter used Google Trends for the comparison and as you can see from the graphs below, it illustrates the growth and decline of some of the most popular social sites in the last year.
Not surprisingly, Digg remains at the top of the pile however over the last year the number of daily visitors hasn’t moved. Compare this with StumbleUpon which has seen it’s traffic double to around 500,000 a day. Propeller has grown a little since it’s launch but traffic seems to have steadied, which is the case for the majority of social sites.
The site with the quickest growth appears to be Mixx, no doubt helped by it’s backing from huge sites such as CNN. It will be interesting to see if Mixx can maintain this growth and I’d also like to see how much of the market Yahoo Buzz takes from the rest of them in the next 6 months.
What’s clear from the graphs is that whilst social media sites are being used by more internet users, longer established social sites are struggling to increase the traffic they already have (eg. Digg, Slashdot, Fark etc). I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a few more large internet companies follow Yahoo and launch their own social media website in the next year.
Link : Traffic trends for Digg vs. nine other social news sites
I reckon if you were to add error bars to the datapoints you’d not see any particular large long-term growth or decline for any of those, just gentle slopes up or down with the exception of mixx very recently and perhaps StumbleUpon over the whole timescale and to a degree Reddit. If I had the time, I’d to a proper linear regression on each to back up the claim…
I've never been a fan of Digg. The community and the ways which an article or post can achieve a high status reminds me a lot of the World of Warcraft forums where well crafted, insightful posts get buried and the posts regarding the sexual preference of Night Elves winds up with 34 pages of responses.
Digg has gotten out of control and Reddit has been taken over by kids. I like http://www.subbmitt.com now. Plus their design is nice and clean and all legitimate stories will make the front page.