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Can You Guess Which Categories Make The Digg Home Page Most?
Written by Allen Stern - February 19, 2008
In December Digg hired a bank to help them look at a sale of the service. At that time I wrote that Digg opened the site to push more non-tech stories to help prospective buyers get a look at what the site could be if it was mainstream. Where are we two months later? Is Digg still pushing other categories outside of tech or have they returned to their roots? We know that gaining a mainstream audience for Digg could not only help them sell but also get more lucrative advertising deals.
To find out, I did a manual count of all of the current frontpage stories going back approximately 24 hours (~11 pages worth) and below are the raw counts in descending order.
- World News - 14
- General Sciences - 9
- Movies - 8
- Tech Industry News - 8
- Travel - 8
- Odd Stuff - 7
- US Elections - 7
- Comedy - 7
- Nintendo - 6
- Environment - 5
- People - 5
- Space - 5
- Design - 5
- Educational - 5
- Business/Finance - 5
- Gaming News - 4
- Food and Drink - 4
- Pets - 4
- Linux - 3
- Political News - 3
- Gadgets - 3
- Security - 3
- Apple - 2
- Comics - 2
- Television - 2
- Basketball - 2
- Celebrity - 2
- Political Opinion - 2
- Music - 2
- Baseball - 1
- Arts and Culture - 1
- Other Sports - 1
- Hardware - 1
- Software - 1
- Autos - 1
- PC Games - 1
What does this tell us? If we don't include gaming in tech, 15% of all frontpage stories were tech related; with gaming the number moves to 25%. Programming hasn't hit the frontpage in nearly two days, software once in three days. Is this what you expected?
Note: these stats might change slightly depending on the day the data was captured.
Update: ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus takes a look at Digg diversity from a blog standpoint. I will have more on this tomorrow.
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Digg thinks their secret sauce is their platform, when in reality its platforms serves a market. IMHO, Digg needed to launch other networks and refine the functionality of those sites to optimize the belief systems for which they serve. Deciding to widen their audience after they are entrenched in a vertical dilutes their brand. 9rules.com made the same mistake. They blew up in the CSS design community, then decided to widen their focus and everyone left. Oops.
looks like a good ranking to me:
im kinda pleased to be associated
Digg is slowly deteriorating into a bathroom stall-like news source. Nearly all of the 'most dugg' items are either images or video, and they're rarely of the educational variety. Sort of sucks. I used to like going to Digg to read up on new tech news and world events and whatnot, now I go if I want to find a kid getting shot in the pancreas with a potato cannon...
Just found a newsreader out there that exists that bases it's content on what the user actually WANTS to see. It's 'Sprout', a "new intuitive newsreader that sends content to the user based on their personal preferences." (says their site). There's a free trial on now. You can find it here: www.yoursprout.ca.
I think it's silly people complain about this. If you want tech stories, go to the tech section! It's so easy!
Silly? Then the same should go for World New then.. wouldn't you say?
Nice idea, did similar research a couple of weeks ago, with historical data, focusing on tech stories.
http://mashable.com/2008/02/05/digg-tech-section-analysis/
Based on this, some smart fellow created a graph using API data:
http://blog.richardcunningham.co.uk/2008/02/tech-stories-percentage-dropping-on.html
Bottom line: you don't have to count manually (:
Also I did a follow up which breaks down the tech stories into types:
http://blog.richardcunningham.co.uk/2008/02/more-digg-stats.html
Given that Digg has a very easy to use API, I don't understand why people keep on doing this by hand, especially this CenterNetworks story which doesn't even come close to being statistically significant.
thanks a lot
Personally I think Digg died the second they started acting like a big company... trying to please everyone and leaving their core audience - tech savvy people - behind. It died the day they started emphasizing crap like politics and entertainment.
would have thought that Comedy would be higher on the list
http://www.spymac.com/details/?2146727
Everything that becomes mainstream, or strives for becoming that often tends to loose their high-tech-guy-visitor-ratio :(
Reddit, Stumbleupon & del.icio.us is my new home(s).
If you want a real sampling of the topics you're gonna have to span more than one day. Given the current political nonsense going on, you have to expect more stories coming non-tech sources. I would venture a guess that in a non election year the results would be slightly different.
You forgot "blog spam"
For some reason I don't feel these numbers show that "Digg" is promoting this content to the page, but that the content being submitted is more heavy in the categories that are ranking higher. If 1,000 stories are submitted in X category and 500 stories are submitted in Y category and 100 stories are submitted in Z category, wouldn't you expect X category items to hit the frontpage more often? I don't agree that Digg is weighing different categories differently to hit push them to the frontpage but is actually weighing the top categories you list making them harder to get a frontpage. It is true that more active categories require more Diggs to make FP so in fact, the argument this story makes is probably the exact opposite.
Ok, only been following the Digg swarm for 8-12 months, but never really saw it as "Tech Only". Slashdot remains Tech-only AFAIAC and Digg is just this SFW place I can get funny pictures.
"Oh Noes!!! Digg has been Raypd by the Interwebs"
Did you take buried front page stories into account? If not your data is about useless as it only counts stories that stayed on the front page and not those that made it.
You need to do more than 24 hours worth to make the stats even worth looking at.
Apple stuffs easily go frontpage and no one like Micro$oft related stuffs.
Everything is about where I expected it to be..except for PC Games.
I expected that catagory to be more active.
originally Digg pulled me away from slashdot, but as there tech base dwindles i find myself slowly heading back
Pointless stats. What exactly do you expect to find out from 1 day's worth of stats?
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