Social sharing is becoming a big contributor to traffic for many sites. While Facebook and Twitter drive more sharing than any other services, Google is trying to compete with Buzz, which is now part of Gmail but shares links to article and blog posts through Google Reader. Over the past month, according to AddThis, sharing through Google Reader is up 35 percent, with a big jump on February 9, the day Buzz launched. This number only measures sharing through the AddThis button, which is on more than 600,000 Websites and gives you the option to share content through more than 200 services. So it is only a proxy for total sharing on Google Reader, but a decent one.
Google Reader still barely registers when compared to Twitter and Facebook, which account for 31 percent and 8 percent of all sharing via AddThis, respectively. But Buzz is definitely giving it a boost.
Are you a budding Web entrepreneur who would like some pointers or advice from seasoned company founders? MayField Fund and First Round Capital are sponsoring a raffle to give away mentoring sessions with the founders of Digg (Jay Adelson), Flickr (Caterina Fake), Mint (Aaron Patzer), Ning (Gina Bianchini), Slide (Max Levchin), and Zynga (Mark Pincus).
The raffle will take place at a private event in Silicon Valley with space for 100 attendees on March 1. But you can win a ticket for the event by applying here. The event and raffle are free, but the 100 attendees in the running will be selected beforehand by partners at Mayfield and First Round.
One common complaint about Digg is that you have to visit the site to actually digg anything. Well, unless you use the Digg toolbar, which caused a bit of controversy when it launched last year. But last month, Digg announced a new API that made it so developers could finally create apps that would allow for the digging of items outside of Digg.com. And today, the service is eating its own dogfood by releasing two such applications: an updated extension for Firefox, and a brand new extension for Chrome.
Both extensions now not only show you a Digg count when you’re browsing a story that has been submitted to the service, but, when authorized, allow you to digg that story right from the overlay drop-down the extension creates when clicked on in the toolbar. Both are fast and simple — especially the Chrome one.
It took a little while, but Digg finally has a new head of PR. The company has hired Michele Husak, who previously held the same job at Pandora, the streaming music recommendation engine. According to her LinkedIn profile, she started the job last month, but they’re just announcing it now.
Husak takes the official title of Director of PR, which is the same position vacated in November by Kiersten Hollars, when she stepped down as Digg’s Director of Communications. Hollars left Digg to re-join her former boss, Brad Garlinghouse who is now helping to re-build AOL. Hollars and Garlinghouse both left Yahoo around the same time in 2008, which is when she went to Digg.
For most of this year, Digg was on a roll, racking up more users, adding Facebook Connect, speeding up its site, launching new features like Digg Trends, and hiring key executives.
But its latest growth spurt stopped in September, 2009 when it peaked at 32 million unique visitors worldwide, according to comScore. In November, its worldwide visitors were down 15 percent to 27 million, which is about half the number of people who visit Twitter.com. Digg was passed by Twitter back in March (see chart below).
If you’re interested in finding hot news on the web it’s not too hard — provided the topic is technology. Twitter, Tweetmeme, Techmeme, Digg, and the like all offer up a mixture of what’s hot in technology with varying degrees of success. But for other topics, it’s not so easy. That’s why Topicfire was built.
Topicfire is what co-founder Ryan Sit calls a “realtime hot news aggregator.” It uses what the service dubs its “HeatRank” to rate any particular story on a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 representing the hottest stories. These stories are broken up into dozens of categories so users can drill down to find just what they want, and easily sort the stream to find just the hottest stories.
Digg has poached Keval Desai away from Google as their new Vice President of Product, we’ve confirmed from the company. Desai’s last day at Google is today.
Desai is a long time Google employee, first joining the company in 2003. He’s currently their Director of Product Management and has led development of product/businesses in Google’s advertising business (including AdWords, Syndication & TV Ads).
He’ll be Digg’s first head of product, a responsibility that has been shared at various times by founder Kevin Rose, CEO Jay Adelson and Chief Strategy Officer Mike Maser. And he’s got a big job ahead of him: Digg is hard at work on releasing an entirely new version of the site.
This afternoon Digg CEO Jay Adelson was interviewed on Fox Business News, where he spoke about the future of Digg and the ways it could potentially cooperate with strugging news organizations. During the interview Adelson made a few interesting comments, some of which contrast with News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch’s assertions in an interview conducted earlier today that “people understand that it’s perfectly fair that they are going to pay for [news]“. Instead, Adelson said that he doesn’t think your average consumer is going to be coughing up money for news any time soon. Instead, he thinks that payments will come from content hubs and aggregators, including Digg itself.
One way Digg can help, Adelson said, is by helping these news sites with their advertising using techniques similar to the ones Digg has implemented.
In a world where Facebook and Twitter dominate the headlines, it’s easy to forget that other social properties, like Reddit still send a ton of traffic to sites. But they absolutely do, and now you can buy your way into that. Starting today, Reddit is testing out a new closed beta experiment to allow anyone to purchase a sponsored link on Reddit’s homepage. Yes, that means you, not just some random advertiser. And not just the homepage, it’s the top overall link.
Now, obviously, this link will be clearly labeled as “sponsored,” but that shouldn’t make it that much less of an enticing opportunity for some individuals who want to drive traffic to their site. Reddit says it sees anywhere from a 2% to a 10% click-through-rate on the ads that run in this area. At the very least, this should mean thousands of hits coming to your site that wouldn’t otherwise get.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Digg captured our collective imagination. In fact, even last year Google thought it was important enough to seriously consider buying Digg, only to back out at the last minute. Digg was the future of news. It was crowdsourced, democratic editorial. The masses decided what was news, not some 50 year old guy in a skyscraper in New York, who secretly hated the Internet.
a lot of the shine has come off Digg. And while it still drives a tremendous amount of traffic, it’s amazing to see just how completely it has been eclipsed by Twitter, which in turn is still just a drop in the Facebook bucket.
Comscore worldwide data says Digg, Twitter and Facebook have 32 million, 58 million and 411 million unique monthly visitors (September 2009), respectively. Google Trends says much the same thing, but the growth over time is fascinating visually. We started with Digg, then added Twitter, and then added Facebook. In the end, Digg and Twitter are just footnote blips in the chart.
About a third of all Internet users worldwide visited Facebook in September 2009, says Comscore. A year ago it was 17%. And what about Digg? They grew from 15 million worldwide unique visitors a year ago to 32 million today. And they tripled page views to 171 million. So it’s not really about Digg doing anything wrong. They just pale in comparison to the guys currently in the spotlight – Twitter and Facebook.
If you could only use one service, which one would you choose? I’d be unhappy about the forced decision, but I’d go with Twitter, even with all its flaws.
Charts below:
