Stumbleupon vs Digg

Stumbleupon vs Digg – Comscore Statistics

It’s been a really busy week and I had not much time to post anything new. As I’ve recently started using social bookmarking sites again (mostly to investigate certain technological solutions), I’ve decided to take the biggest ones under scope and look at their audience. This week it’s StumbleUpon vs Digg, and a bit of Reddit and other sites competing in the area of social bookmarking.

Started by Kevin Rose in 2004, Digg has been the most popular social bookmarking for years. It all changed in August 2010 when the new controversial layout was released. The company will probably be presented in the future as textbook example of “Why every business should listen to it’s customers (users)?”. Followed by controversy over “sponsored articles” on Digg, it seems it’s, unfortunately, a matter of time till Digg fades. Although, I have a lot against TechCrunch recently, I agree with Sarah Lacy’s article titled “RIP Digg“. It’s time for competition to take over their traffic and they haven’t been wasting their time steadily growing in audience. Let’s take a look at statistics.

Stumbleupon vs Digg vs Reddit – Comscore Statistics

Stumbleupon vs Digg Comscore

Digg is currently at 7,867,000* Total Unique Visitors with -56.9% yearly growth.
StumbleUpon with it’s massive growth between January and March 2011 has now 9,642,000 Total Unique Visitors with an impressive +424.8% yearly change.
Reddit has 3,025,000 Total Unique Visitors and -9.3% yearly change. It’s important to note that, although on third position, Reddit is the only site that has noted steady growth in the last six months. Another interesting fact is the user engagement. Reddit has 4 times more page views with two times less unique visitors on their site than Digg.
Newsvine has 3,025,000 Total Unique Visitors and is also on decline with -39.9% yearly growth. Newsvine is the only (of 5 mentioned in this post) social bookmarking site with more female users.
Mixx has been taken down recently after being acquired by UberMedia in January 2011. Unlike their competition, Mixx had fairly stable number of visitors. I am wondering what is going on with Mixx as the site was supposed to relaunch one month after acquisition. It’s been over half year now and still no news from real-time information giant.

Digg button is slowly disappearing or being changed to StumbleUpon button on various news portals. Digg will still be here for quite some time, maybe even 2 years before it gets acquired by some emerging media company. I don’t want to say “unless Digg changes” because they had a lot of time to change and apparently cannot transform retaining its users.

Do you use Digg or StumbleUpon, or any other aforementioned social bookmarking sites? Which one’s your favorite?

*Comscore – July 2011.

http://commetrics.com/articles/2011-trends-get-better-roi-with-facebook-twitter-and-youtube/ Urs E. Gattiker

Arthur

Thanks for this post, just came across it. I have used Stumbleupon but I am not sure if the traffic it brings is really what I want on http://My.ComMetrics.com or our blog for that matter.

So far I have found referrals from Google Plus or blogs like this one are more useful.

thanks for sharing.
- http://www.graviton.me Artur Szalak
  
  Hi Urs,
  Thanks for your comment.
  It depends what audience you’re looking for. When targeting very specific group I’d rather go to more personal networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn that facilitate better information spread among individuals. From my personal experience, none of the posts on this blog got any attention on StumbleUpon, mostly due to its nature. If you ran, e.g. yet another blog with “shocking” “amazing” etc. pictures, top funny youtube videos etc, then you’d probably got a lot leads from StumbleUpon. I, personally, get more visits from Facebook than Google+.
  Cheers
- http://www.graviton.me Artur Szalak
  
  Hi Urs!
  First of all, thank you for visiting my blog. I am an active reader of your ComMetrics blog. Great work with great insights.I know I’m replying late, but hadn’t had much time recently to update graviton.me nor do anything about it really. Also, lost access to Comscore. Hoping that will change soon, though.
  Regarding Stumbleupon, it’s not as bad as Digg nowadays. Recently I made one (and only one in total) comment there and received lots of followers that clearly are spam accounts. In the end, everything depends on type of audience you’re looking for. Stumbleupon is probably one of the best places for disseminating “after-work-graphical-content” as I like to call it.
  Again, thank you for visiting my blog and your comment. Highly appreciated!
  All the best and keep up the great work.
  Cheers
  Artur
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