Comments for 10 Ways Twitter Can Boost Your Social News Profile

The Decline and Fall of Tech on Digg

2008-04-16T21:31:49Z

If you're a fan of digg, you've probably been noticing that tech stories are becoming less and less a feature of the social news site. The reason? Digg is attempting to attract a large mainstream user base. Just how low has tech sunk in digg? We have new data that shows that the number of frontpage tech stories is halving every year on digg.

]]> We last wrote about this trend in February, along with Center Networks. The most interesting stats though came from Richard Cunningham, who used the digg API to create some trend graphs showing how technology stories were on the decline in digg. I contacted Richard again this week to ask for an update to those stats. Richard kindly agreed and so here are some exclusive new charts showing the latest topic trends on digg.

The first graph shows how Technology stories, represented by the dark blue area, have as a percentage of all popular stories dropped steadily since the beginning of 2006. To put this into context, on 1 January 2006 tech stories made up 78% of the total popular stories (i.e. stories that made it onto the digg frontpage). By end of March 2008, that percentage had dropped to 18-20%. In fact, this data shows that the percentage of Tech stories made popular is roughly halving every year:

1st Week in March 2006: 75.72%
1st Week in March 2007: 37.89%
1st Week in March 2008: 19.78%

Currently the most popular category is World & Business, which accounts for just over 22% of the total. The Offbeat category is now around the same as Tech, with 18-19%.

Percentage of Stories Made Popular (by category):

Here is the same data with actual numbers. It's hard to make out the numbers on this page, but you can click on all of these graphs to get the full versions.

Number of Stories Made Popular (by category):

Now let's look at how the Tech category is made up, by sub-category. The following 2 graphs show that Tech News is still the leading type of Tech frontpage story in the Tech category, but Apple is also very popular.

Percentage of Tech Stories Made Popular (by sub-category):

Number of Tech Stories Made Popular (by sub-category):

Top Tech Sources

Finally, in our post in February we looked at the sources of tech frontpage stories, concluding that just a few sites were dominating: Ars Technica, Engadget and Gizmodo (with niche tech sites like TorrentFreak and MacRumors also doing very well). I manually did some calculations to see if that has changed over the past couple of months. The answer: it's still the same select few sites who dominate, but their number of frontpage stories is declining too.

Conclusion

Is it time to accept that Digg is no longer an equivalent to Slashdot, and that it is as much a mainstream news site as say BusinessWeek or People magazine? I'm sure that's what Digg management want us (and their potential buyers!) to think. Judging by these stats, they make a good case. But at what cost? Is Digg's audience growing, or stagnating as its core techie audience goes elsewhere to sites like Mixx, Reddit, Hacker News and maybe even back to Slashdot?

The first 4 graphs were provided by Richard Cunningham, a developer who is currently working on a private beta lifestream service called friendbinder.

Comment from Allen Stern on 2008-04-16

2008-04-16T21:45:15Z

great analysis richard - wow i've had one digg in the last 90 days that's pretty sad.

here's the bottom line - those blogs who were in the game when digg started got the huge massive digg benefits and now those blogs no longer need digg - for the smaller sites like mine, we'd like some digg loving but now it's gone and those in the lead will remain due to the diggs they already received.

Comment from Dave Ambrose on 2008-04-16

2008-04-16T21:54:00Z

Richard is a rockstar!

Comment from Cal Evans on 2008-04-16

2008-04-16T22:09:28Z

I stopped using digg.com a while ago for tech stories. These days I use dzone.com.

=C=

Comment from Richard Cunningham on 2008-04-16

2008-04-16T22:28:38Z

Hope everyone likes the graphs I did, please check out friendbinder

Comment from Sean Hackbarth on 2008-04-16

2008-04-16T22:51:51Z

Unless management does something Digg will be hurt. They're damaging their brand. When I think of Digg I think of interesting tech stories that bubble up from the votes of the masses. It's a way to not have to read 100s of different tech sites. The other news is an add-on.

Now, they're evolving without talking to their community about that evolution. It's like McDonald's slowly changing their menu to a fine steak house without letting their customers know their Big Mac is now made with Kobe beef (until they get the bill, of course).

Comment from Marcin Grodzicki on 2008-04-16

2008-04-16T23:09:53Z

I think it's great news, as long as Diggs audience really is growing. Why? It proves that social web concepts work outside (relatively) narrow techie audience. And if they do work, it means more business for all of us.

Comment from Slimy on 2008-04-16

2008-04-16T23:11:40Z

Techmeme to the rescue.

Comment from The Masked Millionaire on 2008-04-16

2008-04-16T23:19:31Z

I think the real news are the cool graphs.

Live From Las Vegas
The Masked Millionaire

Comment from pb30.myopenid.com on 2008-04-16

2008-04-16T23:21:44Z

Your last reddit link is incorrect

Comment from Andrew on 2008-04-16

2008-04-16T23:24:24Z

I think this just goes to show that there is a huge market for niche social media sites. I've had great luck with Design Float and assume there are plenty of other niche social media sites doing just as good.

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2008-04-16

2008-04-16T23:31:03Z

fixed reddit link.

Comment from Muhammad Saleem on 2008-04-16

2008-04-16T23:37:11Z

The problem is rather simple. It's not that tech news is declining, its the fact that the digg algorithm is designed to force less tech stories to be promoted so the site artificially looks more mainstream than it is.

Comment from Russell Kelly on 2008-04-16

2008-04-17T00:24:34Z

It's seems to me that the way in which Digg has gone mainstream, they've turned themselves into the myspace of social bookmarking.

Comment from Ajay Pathak on 2008-04-16

2008-04-17T00:55:19Z

Richard your website is not opening

Comment from Baron on 2008-04-16

2008-04-17T01:04:16Z

Well, traffic is up so I suppose it's all for the better as far as the company is concerned. They lost touch with their core a long time ago.

Comment from cease on 2008-04-16

2008-04-17T01:34:02Z

digg hasn't been good in a log time. Slashdot, and reddit are much better. I hate Kevin Rose for abandoning us .. he is not one of us

Comment from Television Spy on 2008-04-16

2008-04-17T04:22:31Z

@Muhammad Saleem
do you have proof of that, not saying it's not true but just any examples?

I have noticed that tech pieces require more diggs at least a few 100 to get to the frontpage, while movie and world news are easier to get on to the frontpage. I'd say they want to appeal to a larger fan base so there is less of a focus on technology and more on politics and world news and movies.

Slashdot is too technical, and the overall design and content is boring - its too heavy in covering policies and it doesn't really feel like users have a say.

Comment from Mahesh on 2008-04-16

2008-04-17T04:48:31Z

The real tech sites are news.ycombinator.com, /. and techmeme. these three will meet needs for many tech and biz nerd.

I am noticing that RWW is far better than TC now a days.

Comment from Kevin on 2008-04-16

2008-04-17T05:13:28Z

Wow.. this is really good data... i also personally observed from couple of weeks that tech stories are not becoming popular much these days and most of the front page stories are either related to either gaming, some kind of pics/videos or gadgets. Slashdot is a bit different than digg. I dont use digg much these days. i prefer newspond, alltop and my own online news aggregator for tech stories.

Comment from Chris on 2008-04-17

2008-04-17T07:12:24Z

I think this is more an indication of the viewers not the site. At first the only people using digg were the internet elite...bloggers, web2.0 freaks etc etc. Obvously these people are going to be more interested in those subject. Not that Digg is reaching a wider audience (the casual internet users) tech stories are less of an interest.

Im still a big fan of Digg...lets face it...there isnt exactly a shortage of tech stories on the site.

Comment from Bernardo on 2008-04-17

2008-04-17T08:56:32Z

Well, if this were a decline in fanboy stories, I'd be happy. But sadly it seems to have an adverse effect: more and more of the section is filled with trash of "Linux pwnz all" or "Vista is the greatest" or "OSX is the most secure system blablabla"

I'm hoping people will stop digging the same shit over and over, and will start digging more REAL stories, instead of looking to justify their OS. I don't care about what OS someone else uses...

Comment from ObamaBot3000 on 2008-04-17

2008-04-17T09:19:28Z

I've never understood why people obsess over the Digg frontpage. You know how often I visit the Digg frontpage? Never. Nothing but absolute nonsense ends up there. I just go through the categories I care about, and avoid the Lifestyle and Offbeat nonsense. The way I see things, there's still more than enough Tech on Digg.

Comment from HilaryClitIn on 2008-04-17

2008-04-17T12:47:18Z

Charts need more hover.

Comment from RespeckKnuckles on 2008-04-17

2008-04-17T13:14:59Z

I'm surprised how nobody yet mentioned the fact that almost every five stories is a pro-obama link.

Comment from Richard Cunningham on 2008-04-17

2008-04-17T13:29:25Z

@Ajay, comment 14 is not from me and I don't know why it has my name on and has a link to some site I've never heard of. Links to my sites are in the article.

Comment from Pierre Dumuid on 2008-04-17

2008-04-17T13:47:05Z

I personally think the graphs are poorly done... purely because stacked graph's are difficult to read.

Take for instance the graph, "Percentage of Tech Stories Made Popular".. "Tech News" seems like it fills a fairly consistent ratio percentage. Now to understand how consistent, you have to mentally subtract the top curve of that area from the bottom... which I can't easily do! So you don't really get any idea of how consistent the results are.

Comment from Amit on 2008-04-17

2008-04-17T14:21:56Z

Perhaps the reason is that the DIGG user base has already expanded beyond techies. DIGG is, after all, user generated. Why isn't it possible that the reason tech stories have declined is because users are more interested in non-tech stories?

Comment from Mohammed Al-Busaidi on 2008-04-17

2008-04-17T14:44:42Z

The Obama campaign took over.

Comment from Michael Pope on 2008-04-17

2008-04-17T16:07:26Z

It's my fault. I called up Kevin Rose and asked for more content that wasn't tech related. Now I've forced everyone to use that little drop down menu at the top labled "technology". Sorry about that.

Comment from Michael on 2008-04-17

2008-04-17T18:41:05Z

This is precisely why I don't use Digg anymore, the main reason I used it was because it was primarily Geek stuff, but now its been too diluted.

Comment from Aaron on 2008-04-17

2008-04-17T18:55:58Z

I believe the term is called "selling out"

Comment from eleete on 2008-04-17

2008-04-18T03:03:30Z

Might the topic have shifted to patents and copyrights, or intellectual property ?

Comment from Justin Kistner on 2008-04-17

2008-04-18T06:18:18Z

It is a bummer that Digg lost it's tech focus, not because Digg has evolved, which I think is good, but rather because there is not tech social news epicenter now. I hear people going to Mixx, but there really is no Digg replacement. :(

Comment from Dwindle on 2008-04-18

2008-04-18T07:42:33Z

StumbleUpon wins again. Digg deeper, losers.

Comment from Conflict of Interest on 2008-04-18

2008-04-18T10:20:09Z

I thought sure somebody else would mention this:

Notice Gigaom had 100% change in linked articles? Don't they use Revision3 for their show? Looks like a conflict of interest.

Notice MS was never a topic on the map until Feb '07? Yeah, about the time they did their ad deal together.

Comment from Beth on 2008-04-18

2008-04-19T06:10:23Z

Ditto to everyone who mentioned Obama. Digg is basically useless any more if you aren't looking for EVERY SINGLE pro-Obama article on teh internets. I thought the Ron Paulbots were annoying, but they've got nothing on the Obama cult. Why bother with Digg for tech news when there's so much other crap/campaign propaganda there? I still go, but not nearly as much as I used to.

The sites mentioned above--Design Float and /. or Hacker News--are all you really need for tech (and only DF if you care about that stuff, which I do).

Comment from Beth on 2008-04-18

2008-04-19T06:14:38Z

Why isn't it possible that the reason tech stories have declined is because users are more interested in non-tech stories?

It is possible, obviously. It is, in fact, what's happened. What's your point?

Comment from Mike on 2008-04-20

2008-04-20T20:45:03Z

It's inevitable. As sites get popular the intersection of their users interests gets narrower. So "lighter" stories start to dominate. Which will force users to go to digg clones with niches(N4G.com for game news, BizHeat.com for business news, etc).
Digg will be like ABC, CBS, and the clones with niches will become ESPNs, ScienceChannels's of the net.

Comment from Markx on 2008-04-21

2008-04-21T14:34:30Z

Isn't this just that they added additional categories? Zero-sum game and all?

Comment from james on 2008-04-24

2008-04-24T15:43:27Z

surprised no one mentioned this yet, but the *percentage* of tech stories going down does not mean the same as the *number* of tech stories going down. any number of variables could lower the percentage without necessarily lowering the number.

also, comparing two random days--random as far as i can tell--does not prove anything.

i'm not refuting the overall trend you're suggesting, it's just that the data you have isn't being represented accurately.

Comment from Digg Quiz on 2008-05-05

2008-05-05T14:29:33Z

I believe this is the case because us nerds linked them up and got them to the size they are and now they want to graduate and get us out of their hair so they may get the dumb mainstream traffic celebrity lovers