Social News Sites Traffic Compared

Pingdom has released a new report about traffic trends across a variety of social news sites. The sites included in the report are: Digg, StumbleUpon, Slashdot, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, Newsvine, Fark, Dzone and Sphinn.

What the report shows is that while so many sites focus only on Digg, there are other players that are still worth working.

Here are the findings:

• Traffic-wise, Digg.com stands heads and shoulders above the other sites in this survey, but they seem to have reached a plateau. They have roughly the same number of visitors now compared to a year ago.
• Mixx.com has the most aggressive growth curve. Propeller.com (previously hosted on the Netscape.com domain) is also growing fast, doubling its traffic in the last year.
• Slashdot.org (the original) is losing visitors. They have roughly 25% less visitors now compared to a year ago.
• The five largest based on website visitors (sorted, largest first): Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, Slashdot.org, Propeller.com and Fark.com. (Reddit.com is in 6th place, and is about to overtake Fark.)

The report uses Google Trends for the raw numbers. It’s clear the Digg traffic needle is stuck in neutral. Also, whatever happened to Newsvine? The service were acquired by MSNBC last October and haven’t been in the news since.