New Hitwise statistics create an interesting comparison between Digg and Yahoo Buzz. Depending on which side of the “blogs and personal websites” and “news and media” divide a site stands, it seems the second entity is either almost worthless or nearly as valuable as the first.
Yahoo Buzz
We’ll first address that “worthless” issue. Yahoo Buzz sends some traffic to blogs and personal websites, but the level is only about one-eighth of what Digg manages to direct. It’s better than nothing, perhaps, yet hardly the sort of thing that’ll cause anyone to turn cartwheels. Or label Yahoo Buzz a success.
On the news and media front, the stats play out differently. Heather Hopkins discovered, “Digg.com last week accounted for only 10% more traffic than Yahoo! Buzz to News and Media websites. To put this in context, Last week, Digg.com received a 75% larger share of US Internet visits.”
It seems that certain types of people have pretty much fallen in love with Yahoo Buzz, then. Since the social media site only launched last month, and its parent company is used to coming in second (at best) after spending much greater amounts of time and money on products, this seems like a huge achievement.
Given the rate of Yahoo Buzz’s climb, we wouldn’t be surprised if a proper victory took place within the next month or two.
