Read/Write web came out with a story today that try to show that Yahoo Buzz got bigger than Digg.
The data that the article is based on is new Comscore data that shows that Yahoo Buzz did passed Digg in the number of uniques.
If you consider just the traffic numbers, indeed it seems that Digg are in big troubles. But a quick look at Yahoo Buzz and Digg home pages will show you a very different picture.
On the Yahoo Buzz home page, the most voted story has 118 votes. Most other stories has less than 30. At the same time, Just by taking a quick look you can see that most stories on Digg home page have more than 300 diggs (votes).
It even get worse for Yahoo Buzz if you go to the tech section where most stories have just about 2 - 30 votes. Even if you look at all stories from the last 24 hours and not just recent hours, the picture stays the same.
So yes, Yahoo Buzz is leveraging the Yahoo home page to build a big reach. But sometimes it’s not about quantity - it’s about quality. Digg users are much more loyal to the Digg brand. Their engagement in the site is much higher. Yahoo Buzz users are more likly to skip to the next hot site, as they are less emotionally invested than the Digg users. There is much more chance that they will stay loyal to the site on the long run. I will even argue that their value to advertisers can be higher (put demographics aside as I don’t know Digg data) as their digital participation is higher.
This is a great example why by looking just on page views and uniques we can get a very disturbed picture of reality. This is exactly why attention and engagement metrics are so important to the future of the web.
11 comments ↓
I can’t say I disagree with you. I feel that the quality on digg is much higher right now. However; I feel only time will tell how this will be played out. Social search IS where search is headed (sorry for all you SEO experts). Yahoo! is a little late, but still early in many respects. They too have a loyal audience, only theirs happens to be the largest on the internet. Not to mention the financial backing Yahoo! has. People are somewhat brand loyal to these sites because they make a personal investment in ranking them, but this game is far from over. In the late 90’s no one would have thought we needed another search engine, but then Google came along and reinvented the wheel. Yahoo! still has a good chance to dominate this market, or Google, or maybe some company who is just some kid in his parents basement coding away the next big thing. Tough to tell…
There is no doubt Yahoo still has a chance to win also this market, and yes. If I was Kevin Rose I would start to be afraid… That said, as I wrote, I think that the talks about the death of Digg are way to early. What they probably need is to find a good distribution partner that will be able to give them what Yahoo home page gives Yahoo buzz (anyone said Microsoft? ;))
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yahoo personalortance of Participation or Why Digg is Still Better than Yahoo at nuconomy blog
yahoo search engineortance of Participation or Why Digg is Still Better than Yahoo at nuconomy blog
I used yahoo it is little interesting for me…The first person can provide the review abt the the post …Thats i really like that ..
Yahoo is working on many things they increased search quality and now they introduced buzz so yahoo has a good chance to get the market share ….
-Mikel
Thank you, nice info Digg is so powerful.
Great info on digg everything is submitted by the digg user community.
Thank for sharing.
Thanks your message has very much helped me:)
Thanks your message has very much helped me:)
Nice information mate, good for sharing here.
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