While showcasing Digg 3.0, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch claimed that Digg was challenging the New York Times on page views. His traffic assumptions were based on Alexaholic rankings.
Mike repeated the arguement that Digg is getting to the size of the New York Times at the Gnomedex 6.0 conference in Seattle which was later questioned by ZDNet.
Today Hitwise, Internet Traffic Watchdog, released actual statistics comparing the traffic of Digg vs NYT vs Slashdot.
The share of page impressions for the NY Times was 19 times greater than for Digg for that week. If I put the NY Times on the same chart as Digg, Digg's traffic would look tiny and relatively flatThis report has put an end to all the speculations and rumours floating around.
The Alexa figures were grossly incorrect and TechCrunch too has accepted this fact - "previous speculation that Digg could soon pass the NYTimes in online traffic is not supported by more definitive data."
Wondering why Mike choose to compare New York Times with Digg at the first place ? They are two different planets.
Hitwise sees a the wide gulf between Digg users and NY Times users. Digg get most of the traffic from search engines while NY Times receives just 16% of search traffic. Digg is frequented by the young 18-24 year old crowd by NY Times has just 9.5% user in that age group.
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/07/techcrunch-backs-away-from-claim-that.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
It's interesting also to see that Slashdot is declining slightly in page impressions. Digg in contrast is doing very well, better than i had expected, i originally thought that Digg traffic was slowing a bit, of course i had no data to back it up. Could Digg have been doing well in the expense of others? Slashdot?
Written on 7/7/06 5:02 PM