Digg used to be one of the most talked about sites on the web, at least in tech, web news, and social media circles. Over the last couple of years, however, Digg appears to have lost some of its luster. You will often hear people talking about how nobody uses Digg anymore, but the fact is that this is simply not true.
A few days ago, there were reports circulating that Digg had lost 50% of its U.S. traffic over the last six months. This was based on data from Quantcast.
Digg has now put up a blog post saying that this is not the case. They provided a screen cap of their visitors overview from Google Analytics.
You can see that they have over 17 million unique visitors for October. You can also see that visitors are on the way up since August.
Digg’s Ben Fork-Williams says, “Note this is worldwide traffic; visits from the United States over this period are consistently 50% (49.57% in October).” He then shares the following stats:
- Digg Newsrooms have been in beta for a month, and page views per visit are up 3x versus classic Digg.
- Higher engagement from Facebook fans, with users coming from Facebook spending an average of 15 minutes on site as compared to 10 minutes for other logged in users.
- 23% increase in daily users on mobile since the launch of Digg’s revised iOS app with Newsroom integration.
- 51% of Digg traffic is direct.
- 13 million times every month someone types Digg.com into a browser.
When I look at Digg these days, I still see interesting content, and at its core, that’s really what it’s all about. It still fulfills that function. The Digg counts on these articles don’t really mean that much to me. Whether there is an article with 3 Diggs or one with 200, I’m still seeing a wide range of interesting links that I may not have otherwise seen, and there is value to that. That doesn’t mean I can’t look at Reddit or StumbleUpon as well.
The point its, Digg is not dead, and there is plenty of room for a lot of content discovery sites. Mobile, as illustrated by that stat the company shared, is a key to this too. It’s easier to find time for all of this content discovery when you have access to it in your pocket at all times.