When I wrote my post New Features in Digg 3.0 Preview last week I had no idea I would receive 4000+ visits from the Digg Story in 2 hours!
Interestingly, the Digg Visitors left no comments - they came and went and read the post and must have liked it. Anyway, after you look at the next chart (below) I'll tell you about the next update to Digg coming in July.
My traffic has varied, depending on what I write about and when I write about - and the nearest thing to the Digg traffic came from the American Idol 5 final.
Now, John Battelle reports Digg 3.0 will have updates to make it even better.
"The real revolution will come with a second push in July, when Digg introduces two new infosthetic features that visually display in detail what stories are getting relatively hot/cold, how many users say so, who says so, and if those diggers share common interests. Digg Incoming will allow users to scale vetting the +2000 incoming stories that come in daily (or rather make it possible for any one digger). New diggs will drop down like stacking blocks in realtime for each story, making quickly and easily comprehensible the relative popularity of hundreds of stories, lined up alongside each other, at a time. The other upcoming data visualization Rose calls "Digg spy on crack"---referring to the current Digg Spy, a running screen of realtime user activity (showing diggs, undiggs, comments, etc.). The new spy will display the dynamic bunching of user activity around popular stories like the movement of bees aggregating around burgeoning/wilting flowers.
Theres' so much more that's being offered in each release - more information that can be read a number of different ways - to give people insight on the stories and to show BUZZ.
Also, Digg's numbers are compared here with the original story that inspired mine here.
"In a review of Digg v3, TechCrunch declares that Digg is challenging The New York Times online in terms of page views. As evidence, Mike references an Alexaholic graph. Let’s look at the actual numbers. "
Here's the NY Times Traffic Stats from Nielsen
I wonder if the Personality data is actually the internal traffic readings from the NYTimes own Analytics (probably not...just taking a stab at this). IN other words, Nielson's data is presented (estimated) next to the actual data (personality) - but I have no reason to believe the NY Times will just make their web stats public (maybe they would as it's to their advantage to do so) but most companies don't do this-they guard that data.
That TalkCrunch interview was interesting. They brought up this idea that the newspaper folks might eventually be better off blogging at home, once it's a more attractive option.
I also thought it was interesting that TechCrunch gets more traffic from Digg than from Google.
Personally, I don't think Digg has proven itself yet. They admit they don't censor anything and got to be so popular because of Paris Hilton.
For now I think Digg is a great tool for geeks with too much time. Their "verticals" strategy I think will mostly fail to reach out as far as they would like.
As far as the Digg vs. NY Times traffic comparisons, I think what they are really getting at: the web is a big place and the NY Times is just a little piece of the pie. The same goes for Digg.
Posted by: PJ | July 1, 2006 11:35 PM | Permalink to Comment