Online research firm Hitwise found that the New York Times had almost 20 times the traffic of Digg for the week ending July 1st, in sharp contrast to blog posts that have Digg drawing closer to the Paper of Record online.
Mike Arrington and Scott Karp may wish to put plans for Digg’s coronation celebration on hold. Hitwise analyst LeeAnn Prescott posted the awful truth about the two sites:
According to the Hitwise US sample of 10 million internet users, Digg ranked at #101 in the News & Media category in for the week ending July 1, 2006. The share of page impressions for the NY Times was 19 times greater than for Digg for that week.
Prescott noted the difference in demographics for the two audiences of each site. Twenty-six percent of Digg’s visitors fall into the coveted 18-24 age group, but only 9.5 percent of Times users occupy that range. 34 percent of the Times users are aged 55 and up, while only 10 percent of Digg’s audience are in that group.
That’s not to say Digg’s traffic isn’t significant. Prescott showed in a graph how Digg has surpassed longtime geek news favorite Slashdot in market share. Worse for Slashdot, its share is falling while Digg’s continues to rise.
“Very little of Digg’s search volume was navigational, indicating low brand recognition,” Prescott wrote of the four-week period that ended July 1st. The top 20 search terms sending visits to Digg shows its audience is “definitely young and tech focused.”
Half of the New York Times’ top 20 search terms were navigational, as its audience seems to use search engines to get to places online, rather than entering the site in the browser address bar or using a bookmark to get there.
Digg has not supplanted the New York Times in market share yet. While the Times rated 8th among News and Media websites with a 1.46 percent market share, Digg only garnered 0.13 percent, good for 101st place.
Put me down for a couple of commemorative mugs when Digg succeeds the Gray Lady, though.
RankNameDomain Market Share of Visits 1 Yahoo! News news.yahoo.com 6.35% 2 The Weather Channel – US www.weather.com 5.57% 3 CNN.com www.cnn.com 3.92% 4 MSNBC www.msnbc.com 3.72% 5 Yahoo! Weather weather.yahoo.com 1.81% 6 Drudge Report www.drudgereport.com 1.77% 7 Google News news.google.com 1.74% 8 New York Times www.nytimes.com 1.46% 9 USA Today www.usatoday.com 1.45% 10 BBC News news.bbc.co.uk 1.29% 101 Digg www.digg.com 0.13% Source: Hitwise
—
Add to 
Bookmark murdok: 
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
