Comments for The Social News Faceoff

The Social News Faceoff

2006-10-11T21:33:27Z

Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.

This post looks at the main players in the Social News space, to try and identify their characteristics and understand the dynamics of the market. The sites we analyze are digg, Netscape, Newsvine, and Reddit. While there are many other social news sites around, a great number are clones and so we believe the above four represent the cream of the crop (admittedly Netscape is a clone of digg, but because of its size and history as a mainstream portal - it obviously warrants closer inspection).

What makes the social news space particularly interesting is that there are a variety of different approaches. Even without doing the analysis, we know that Digg is going to be the most popular site. But if you've ever taken a quick look at Newsvine, you'll know that the future dynamics may not be so clear cut. What works for a technical audience might not, in the long run, be what is going to become a mainstream format. So will this market split? Will Newsvine become more popular than digg? Does Netscape stand a realistic chance of catching up? In this side by side comparison, we hope to find some answers.

Estimating the number of users

As we have done in previous faceoffs, we approximate the number of users in each social news site using Alexa's daily page views. While Alexa is not perfect by any means, it is a good comparative measure in this case. As the baseline, we have used Digg.com's official user base figure of 325,000 users. We also use an additional metric - number of votes for two different stories (one tech and one politics). The technology story that we used is the recent YouTube video where the founders of YouTube discuss the Google acquisition. For the political story, we choose the BBC article about US granting North Korea nuclear funds.

]]> The faceoff chart

	Digg	Netscape	Newsvine	Reddit
Users	325,000	55,000 (estimate)	60,000	32,500 (estimate)
Alexa rank	91	397	3,130	1,020
Alexa daily views (Per million)	450	75	12	45
Google blogsearch links	198,500	46,800	8,230	29,000
# votes on 1st story	996	5	1	1
# votes on 2nd story	266	82	0	0
Focus	Techies	Web savvy / mainstream	Mainstream	Techies
Categories	Technology, Science, All	Politics, Technology, All	All	None
Profile and history	X	X	X	X
Flexible views	X			X
Friends	X	X	X	X
Comments	X	X	X	X
Comment rating	X	X	X	X
RSS	X	X	X	X
Related stories		X	X	X
Recommended/ Handpicked		X	X	X
User Interface	- Clean -Simple -Great	- Nice, not great - A bit too packed - Ads are huge - Channels should be a pulldown	- Exceptional user interface!	- Minimalist
Interesting/ Unique features	- Flexible filters Nice use of Ajax Very well designed - Lots of smart little things	- Comments by type - Related stories	- Great demo! - Users contribute content - Lots of smart little things	- Recomm - Personal- ization

Research notes

Some things we found interesting while doing the analysis.

The front pages of Digg and Netscape had very little if anything in common. We infer from this that they have very different demographics.
Newsvine has an outstanding user interface. A lot of thought went into it and it is brilliant. This site illustrates that a lot of features and a lot of information can be presented in a simple and digestible way.
Reddit has a feature called subreddits, which supposedly resemble categories - but it's done via a separate subdomain. Perhaps this is cool, but it could be confusing.
Reddit has a recommended stories feature, which is a simple filter based on the stories that the user likes. This is a very good idea and other sites should add this sort of personalized view, because voting on stories reveals user likes and dislikes.

Traffic Dynamics

We can gain additional insights by looking at the traffic dynamics over the last year. Reddit, for all its innovation, is struggling to be a serious contender in the social news space. Perhaps they need to revamp their user interface, because compared to the others it is fairly minimalist. Based on Alexa traffic trends, it appears that Newsvine is not gaining much momentum. It is not clear why, since their user interface is great. Perhaps it's just an uphill battle to sway away traffic from the likes of CNN, Google News and topic-focused blogs.

The chart below focuses on the Netscape vs Digg race. As we can see Netscape is not catching up - it is in fact losing some of its early gains. We think they should revisit their user interface and usability.

Conclusion

There are really no surprises here - Digg is the king of social news. It is simple, elegant and very very popular. The question is what will happen going forward? Comparing digg with Netscape, note the difference between the number of votes on a technology post vs. a political post. For the technical post there is a huge gap between the two sites, but it is not as big for the political one. So digg remains the premier social news site for technology news - but in other categories that are geared more towards mainstream, there is not as much activity.

The question is will the digg model work for mainstream? It might be too plain, which is why Netscape jumped into the game - and this may be why Newsvine has a chance to be successful. But as it stands, and for foreseeable future, Digg rules!

Comment from Noah Winecoff on 2006-10-11

2006-10-11T21:46:51Z

Digg is my favorite among the 4. Newsvine doesn't make voting for stories as apparent as digg and reddit users are very picky about what they vote on. I agree though, digg is the champ.

Comment from Corey Spring on 2006-10-11

2006-10-11T22:07:17Z

Nice article and chart. I would echo the sentiments that Newsvine has the best UI of any of the others and I would expect it to grow well into the future.

As for Alexa rankings, take them with a grain of salt - it only tracks IE, Windows users who have the toolbar installed (i.e. my grandma). There's also the anomaly that occurs to digg around the middle of April on Alexa that has been written about before.

I think each will have their own place and be around for a long time because of each different thing they have to offer (ex. - digg is great for tech news, but sucks as far as a community)

Comment from Mike D. on 2006-10-11

2006-10-11T23:11:32Z

Whoa! Thanks so much for the great comments about Newsvine but allow me to provide a few details/corrections:

1. Users -- About 60,000 registered and about 500,000 unregistered per month
2. Friends -- Yes
3. Related stories -- Yes

Great stuff to be launched this months as well...

Comment from Ted on 2006-10-11

2006-10-11T23:34:55Z

Using Alexa is fine for general traffic comparisons, but for user counts, not so much.

You should have just emailed Kevin, Jason, Mike, and Alexis(reddit guy?) and you could've gotten their stated answers, which also have to be taken with a grain of salt but will surely by far more accurate then using Alexa to extract it based on one site's comments in the past.

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2006-10-11

2006-10-11T23:51:58Z

Mike, thanks for your comment. I've added the friends and related checks.

Ted, I think you raise a very good point. Alexa is ok for traffic comparisons, but I think we're finding it is not great at user count approximations (we also underestimated delicious in the previous bookmarking faceoff). I've updated the table to that effect - will try and find out more accurate user numbers for netscape and reddit.

Comment from Rob on 2006-10-11

2006-10-12T00:50:34Z

I like Newsvine the best because they don't get caught up on the Web 2.0 hype and have all AJAX and useless features. Very simple, easy to read design that's pleasant on the eyes.

Comment from feedbite on 2006-10-11

2006-10-12T00:59:28Z

A slightly different twist on social news, feedbite focuses on the feeds, not just the articles. There will be a big release with a new interface, voting and much more next week, stop by. Comments and better stats coming soon.

Comment from Alex Iskold on 2006-10-11

2006-10-12T01:17:34Z

The reason for use of Alexa ranking is the following: page views are done by actual active users, and represent a measure of activity on the site.

Alex

Comment from Jerry Firman (oldfogey) on 2006-10-11

2006-10-12T02:09:17Z

Keep watching Newsvine. You ain't seen nothing yet. There should have been a rate of growth category.

Comment from Alex Iskold on 2006-10-11

2006-10-12T02:34:33Z

Jerry,

Thanks for your comment. I did look at this:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&compare_sites=&y
=p&q=&size=medium&range=1y&url=newsvine.com

Alex

Comment from JT on 2006-10-11

2006-10-12T05:32:35Z

Nice article, but I wish you would have included two other sites:
www.shoutwire.com and
http://www.care2.com/

Although there's no way to separate the news rating section at Care2 from the rest of the site via Alexaholic, overall that site and Shoutwire seem to running fairly close to Newsvine.

Shoutwire is curious because it seems that at least some of its traffic is coming from Torrentspy.com, as its featured prominently there. I believe it's the more "legitimate" business arm of the same company. Interesting strategy to take advantage of the high traffic to Torrent search engines now...

Comment from Ross Mayfield on 2006-10-11

2006-10-12T05:54:42Z

slashdot?

Comment from Mike D. on 2006-10-11

2006-10-12T06:06:11Z

Just as a point of reference, we don't find our internal traffic trends matching up with Alexa's even remotely. When actual traffic is up, Alexa reported traffic is down, and when actual traffic is down, Alexa reported traffic is up. I'm sure Digg, Netscape, Newsvine, and Reddit are all in the same boat as far as this is concerned as Alexa toolbar users on these sites are underrepresented as a percentage of the user population. For sites that have the standard percentage of IE users (90%), it's probably not as big of a problem, but for early-adopter/cutting-edge sites like social news sites, these sorts of things really do need to be taken with a grain of salt. The good news is, traffic to our site and probably all of these sites, have been up month-over-month for the entire summer (generally a season when news sites experience perennial downturns in traffic).

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2006-10-11

2006-10-12T06:26:35Z

Re Slashdot, the reason we didn't include them is that our definition of 'social news' is when things like ranking and deciding what stories make the frontpage etc are decided by a community. Essentially, there needs to be some voting aspect - hence Slashdot doesn't qualify.

But if you define social news as being a site where people socialize (via comments etc), then yes Slashdot should've been included. I guess it depends on your definition :-) We should've clarified this at the top of the post.

Comment from danny on 2006-10-11

2006-10-12T06:51:28Z

Traffic numbers aside, Newsvine unquestionably churns out the best quality product from the mainstream news reader's perspective. For many reasons, it achieves an appearance of editorial authenticity that is not yet matched by the others on your list. Importantly, I feel genuinely informed when I visit the site. It's a long-term winner.

And btw, Alexa is absolute trash, regardless of the browser skew. I haven't met one entrepreneur who thinks it's anything remotely close to reliable. My thermostat is a more accurate indicator of our site performance.

Comment from Phoenix on 2006-10-12

2006-10-12T08:24:22Z

Newsvine sign up page has a bug. You cant get an account even if you want to...perhaps they don't want new users. I tried to register several times and then gave up! I also reported it to them but it does not look like they have set it right as yet!

Comment from Jeremiah on 2006-10-12

2006-10-12T08:31:15Z

Another cool feature at Netscape that you should have mentioned is the messaging system and tags. Two things that Digg has been lacking since the start.

Comment from Matthew Ogston on 2006-10-12

2006-10-12T13:10:37Z

You make a very good point Alex about mainstream social networks. The majority of people who aren't from a 'web' background just don't 'get' the big four networks discussed - let alone know that they exist. The future of these networks will be to present their information in a format that is more visually appealing to the mainstream, and produce pages that are not so text heavy. Social networks need to cater for their 'lurkers' as well as the contributors.

Comment from Sergey on 2006-10-12

2006-10-12T13:59:20Z

There IS comment rating in reddit

Comment from tbo on 2006-10-12

2006-10-12T14:30:00Z

How would MoQvo compare to these?

Comment from Bill on 2006-10-12

2006-10-12T15:59:37Z

Very interesting. Thank you!

Comment from Phoenix on 2006-10-12

2006-10-12T16:11:42Z

I came back to say Newsvine has fixed their bug. The admin wrote to me after seeing my comment here and I also managed to get an account there. Shows they take their readers seriously. I too like Newsvine a lot. :)

Comment from Adam on 2006-10-12

2006-10-12T19:26:15Z

Reddit has comment voting.

Comment from PK on 2006-10-12

2006-10-12T20:15:17Z

Newsvine is by far and away has the best overall content, while Digg is king of tech news. I've had a couple of my articles appear on the front page of digg and newsvine and there is a huge difference in which succeed on either site. Also the I can vouch for the "digg-effect" as they almost crashed my servers.

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2006-10-12

2006-10-12T23:28:27Z

Added comment rating for Reddit - apologies for missing that feature.

Comment from DougHolton on 2006-10-13

2006-10-14T03:26:04Z

It's like evaluating games. Some may have the best graphics, some may have the best geek appeal, but ultimately it boils down to game play (i.e. tetris, mario brothers, etc.).
With these sites it is the content that matters. The stories on digg are lame. It's stupid tidbits and youtube videos. On the homepage right now for example is a story on "Computers and Cat Litter". Who cares about that, Mac-using cat lovers? Is that the digg audience now?

Reddit is the same thing, only there are two dozen lame stories on the front page instead of 5 or 6. Nothing but stupid nature photos, old joke sites, and shock news stories.

I like Newsvine now. It is a regular news site like Yahoo or CNN or whatever, plus the addition of voting, categories, commenting, and submitting your own stuff on the side if you wish.

Comment from Julian on 2006-10-15

2006-10-15T15:07:35Z

Another way that demonstrates how clearly digg.com is ahead is to use google trends:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=digg%2C+newsvine%2C+reddit&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all