Yahoo Buzz is a Game Changer for Social Media; And Spells Trouble for Digg!
Yahoo Buzz is a social media experiment by Yahoo! that is currently in a closed beta. We found out today what kind of boost Buzz is giving the current selected blogs and news sources - Muhammad Saleem wrote that it is giving publishers huge bumps in both traffic and comments. Muhammad, you'll recall, wrote on ReadWriteWeb just about the only positive review of Yahoo Buzz when it first launched. In case you missed it, let's revisit the reasons why Buzz is a game changer. And why Digg is in big trouble...
First the facts. Yahoo told ReadWriteWeb that "Yahoo.com has sent approximately 16 million total referrals to just a subset of the publishers in the beta during the first two weeks via “Buzzing Now” links in the Featured section of the homepage." Yahoo gave us the following data to back this up:
Early Publisher Results – Yahoo! Buzz Beta (Feb 27, 2008 – Mar 10, 2008):
· Salon.com reached over 1 million uniques in one day for the first time in the company's 12-year history, after Yahoo.com linked to one of their highly "buzzed" stories (they issued this press release)
· US Magazine: In part due to a Yahoo.com link, February 27th was the second highest day in overall Usmagazine.com traffic since its launch in June 2006. Referral visits from the Yahoo! homepage accounted for 32% of total visits that day.
· When Yahoo.com linked to one of their stories, The Smoking Gun received approximately 1 million additional page views over their average traffic, with over 275,000 visitors coming from the Yahoo! homepage.
· Portfolio.com (part of Conde Net) received over half a million referral visits from a Yahoo.com “Buzzing Now” link.
· HuffingtonPost received over 800,000 unique visitors from Yahoo.com in one day.
· Dallas Morning News’ traffic spiked as a result of their Yahoo.com “Buzzing Now” link, making the featured story their most viewed single story on dallasnews.com that day.
· Imaginova: Space.com and LiveScience.com articles were featured and linked to directly from Yahoo!'s homepage and both sites saw significant increases in daily visitors and traffic after being featured for just 2 hours.
Note: TechCrunch also has some data from Yahoo Buzz, which is a little different to ours. They're both worth noting. Also TechCrunch itself got a link from the Yahoo homepage and despite it being a Saturday, they had their "highest traffic day ever and over 1,000 comments were left on the post."
Wait, What's Yahoo Buzz Again?
Muhammad explained in his earlier post: "Imagine if Digg had 10 times the incoming traffic, and got a percentage of ad-revenue from each of the sites that were promoted to the front page. Yahoo! Buzz does essentially that."
Publishers, Stop Drooling...
Up till now, bloggers have relied on niche - but still powerful - aggregators to get people reading their content. For tech bloggers, Digg, Slashdot and even StumbleUpon have been the places to be - particularly on the front pages of those sites. I'm sure there are similar aggregators that political bloggers, entertainment bloggers etc aspire to get on.
Now, publishers are rightly salivating at the prospect of being featured on Yahoo Buzz. But batten down your servers first! And there is the little matter of being selected to participate in this still exclusive club.
Watch out Digg, Yahoo is Eating Your Lunch
Yahoo.com is the ultimate aggregator of them all. What's more, it is precisely the holy grail that digg has been reaching for - MAINSTREAM users. While digg has been desperately trying to make itself into a mainstream social news site - and it has succeeded to a degree, as its front page now includes politics, entertainment and other non-tech stories - it hasn't got anywhere near the punch that Yahoo.com still packs. Simply put, Yahoo.com has the audience. And now it is implementing digg features.
This spells massive trouble to digg, because now why would Yahoo want to buy digg? It means one less potential buyer for digg. And there weren't that many to begin with, because probably only a big Internet/media company would be willing to shell out the multi-millions that digg wants. Buzz is proving that Yahoo can implement the features; and the users are already liking it - because they are clicking the links and commenting on them (if TechCrunch's case is any indication).
Conclusion
Digg's own users won't abandon digg for Buzz, that isn't the issue here. But this looks to be a case of the social media pie getting bigger... much bigger! Social news is going mainstream. This is potentially great for niche blogs, when Buzz opens up for all. It's certainly great news for Yahoo.com readers, because they'll be exposed to a whole new world of quality, fast blog content. But it's bad news for digg, whose aspirations to go mainstream are looking increasingly fragile.
SEE ALSO: Why Yahoo! Buzz is a Brilliant Idea
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Why is it that we rootfor the underdog - until it succeeds - then focus on its decline and replacement.
Think how much a Digg frontpage has helped THIS blog over the years
SEW, I don't think Buzz will replace digg - which I still regard as the top social news site for tech. But Buzz has a much better chance of taking social news mainstream, even tho digg wants to be that too. So that was the point I was trying to make.
Yes but these stats only show us how lucrative it is to get on the front page of Yahoo (something we all know). These stats don't show us anything at all with how well Buzz is doing in any respect.
Nevertheless this is bad news for Digg.
It really does look as if Digg has peaked
Yahoo Buzz has been very well done. It's good to see a site that will give Digg a run for it's money. Another site that I think is better than Digg is Mixx.com
the world IS a social network, technology is just (slowly) catching up to reality
imagine the new york times as a social network, or nbc, cbs, the united nations, ....
Although this means that social news will get a huge boost, it doesn't mean that niche blogs without a huge number of loyal readers would get a big break.
It will become very hard to get a niche blog on to the Yahoo front page as this will be ultimate goal for gaming the system.
Yeah I have been saying this since buzz was announced.
Digg have been trying to go mainstream for sometime. They seem to have turned their back on their tech roots, early adopters and top digg users.
Yahoo already is mainstream and pretty much owns this space.
What yahoo will have done if they pull it off and make it a success is create a digg clone using their massive traffic.
Other large companies could simply copy yahoo and get thier own coders to create it and then leverage their own traffic to launch it.
Can digg stand on its own? is it still burning VC money?
My guess news corp, google and MS are still in the running to buy it.
Doesn't these large companies circling around these small tech companies remind anyone of the old record industry bidding wars? instead of advances its earn outs.
Although I do not think Digg will go away - Yahoo made an excellent move publishing the stats. Digg is primarily built on the ego / vanity of publishers and marketers trying to make the homepage. Compare 20 - 50K visitors from a Digg homepage to 800K - 1M and you see the allure that Buzz will have.
I hadn’t really thought about this before, but it now makes perfect sense. It points to what Yahoo needs to do in order to reach its full potential and I think (hope) we may be witnessing their strategy unfold to do just that. Given that Yahoo, probably more than anyone else, commands a huge base of mainstream users, it should actively seek out ideas and models that have been proved in niche markets like tech, and replicate them for its mainstream users. Brilliant!
So don’t waste time on social networking – that’s already gone mainstream via Facebook; don’t do online video – YouTube has that covered. Instead do social news, do casual gaming, bring delicious to the fore, buy RTM for task management, buy Evernote and integrate it with Yahoo’s latest mobile offering for mobile bookmarking, etc. I bet there are many better examples.
What’s more, I note that buzz is currently only a tiny link on the Yahoo.com frontpage. What will happen if/when it becomes the main item on the first tab?
I am excited for Yahoo at the prospect of leveraging their user base to stage a much needed come back. Let’s just hope it’s not too little, too late.
I'd like to get on the front page of any site.
For a small niche site like mine getting on the front page of Yahoo would change everything.
The Masked Millionaire
www.TheMaskedMillionaire.com
Hey anyone got some ideas how to buzz up affiliate programs?
THis looks like a great way to sell useful products
http://www.direct-marketing.tv
Yahoo is the biggest site on the Web still. It could develop Yahoo! Poo and have it eat Diggs lunch or anyone elses lunch. Look at Yahoo Answers. This isn't about game changing products and doesnt have to be for Yahoo to be successful. Which is why I wonder why they spend their time doing soooooooo many things instead of more time on their core things.
I agree that social media, in this case people as users giving hierarchy to news, can grow another significant step with Yahoo! Buzz, and that it is a service directed to mainstream users. But this ain't a reality yet, and I don't know if the users will really "get" the game, or if they'll like it or if they'll keep doing it.
The technology community is much more engaged and Digg is a way better service than Y!Buzz. Digg has a simpler and more understandable interface (I don't know why Yahoo! forces you to go to the news story when you buzz it and doesn't give you the immediate ajax answer like Digg gives, which makes much more sense, it is smarter and keeps the spirit of voting alive), Digg shows you who dugg every story, has a logic meaning for the digg number box while Yahoo! Buzz index number doesn't explain itself directly (and keeps you wondering why a story with just 1 vote has 110 buzz index, which is more confusing that interesting and it doesn't help the mainstream people to understand it) and it doesn't have any social functionality in it, I mean, it doesn't take you anywhere. Besides the fact you don't know who dugg the stories (your potential think-alike network), you can't comment on Yahoo! Buzz listed stories and you cannot connect with anyone - which makes the Buzz a cold place to be (for a service that is actually a thermometer and aims to be a social service). Yahoo! has 360, delicious, flickr and lots of other services that could be more into Buzz, and they could even indirectly, in a profile exploratory way, for example, but they're not. That's why I believe that the Buzz isn't a threat to Digg and it won't be a succesful product while it's closed, cold and not simple as it could for the mainstream users.
That's why I believe Yahoo! Buzz was made just to show the dinamically changing scenario of the most popular stories with a plus, that is allow people to vote (and share by email). So it is not a primarly strong social media service.
Still, it is good to see Yahoo! make this step. And I think Yahoo! can fix it or even make it relatively succesful the way it is now, but that's not as promising, usable and good product as it could be - and it won't top Digg as a better service.
Wanted to share an observation. I was on the New York Times website and their "share" button for the article tools now includes Yahoo Buzz and they got rid of Newsvine.
I think will win for those loyal Yahoo users. Those users might change to yahoo buzz or they might use both. I am just analyzing the "Consumer Insight".
This is great, very informative post.
nhick
http://www.itrush.com