Last night ReadWriteWeb got its first link on the Yahoo homepage, thanks to Yahoo Buzz - the beta social news service that is letting blogs get coverage on the world's most trafficked website. Our initial turn on yahoo.com happened late at night, 10pm PST, and lasted around 3.5 hours. It happened to our post about Wikipedia getting a print version. The verdict? While it didn't result in the avalanche of traffic that other publishers have reported, it still sent 45,000 page views to RWW in 3.5 hours outside prime time and where our link was the bottom-right of 4 links. That is more than a typical prime time digg or slashdot homepager. But what surprised us the most was the number of comments that Yahoo visitors left!
Just before 10pm, the Wikipedia story had around 30 comments - not bad for our site, which generally gets high quality comments and not much of the inane 'filler' comments you see on other blogs. But after yahoo.com linked to the story, it raced up to 150 comments. That tells us that Yahoo users are much more engaged with the content they click to, than users from digg or slashdot.
What's more, many of the comments to the Wikipedia post were thoughtful and added to the discussion. OK many of the comments were critical of the post, it must be said. But still, you could tell that people were passionate about the topic. Here's an example, comment 64 from Sandy:
"I use Wikipedia almost everyday. It's a great and very informative website. I look there for info before I check other information websites. And I see how they can get away with this but do I think it is fair and right? Absolutely NOT.
In fact, Poetry.com does the same thing. They have these poetry contests and people from all over are enticed into sending in their own personal work thinking they will be made famous and receive a big prize if they win, etc. But that doesn't happen at all. [...]"
So Yahoo Buzz is not only sending large quantities of traffic to blogs, it is also sending people that want to comment - and who leave interesting, informed comments. By contrast, digg and slashdot traffic usually doesn't result in many extra comments on blogs - those people usually leave their comments on digg / slashdot. That's fair enough, as those two sites have thriving communities. But to me and many other new media publishers, it's yet another plus to Buzz over digg and slashdot.
RWW on yahoo.com
Also, and I don't mean to harp on about this (but I will), digg's continued systemic problems are not helping them. Favoritism of certain publishers (whereby only a few publishers in each category dominate the digg frontpage), manually taking power off power users, manipulating the topics that get to the digg frontpage, issues with gaming, charges of censorshop, the endless barrage of sensationalism, repetitive lists and Kevin Rose stories on the frontpage - all of these things and more have damaged digg's brand.
Quite simply, Yahoo Buzz is looking more and more like the future of social news. Digg needs to take a few pages from Buzz's book if it's to survive in the mainstream.
ReadWriteWeb has been pretty bullish on Yahoo Buzz. We published one of the few positive reviews of Yahoo! Buzz when it opened, and in March we published some traffic statistics from Yahoo! and called the site a game-changer. As we noted in a recent update, the "Buzz-effect" is potentially orders of magnitude larger than the similar "Digg-effect."
Yahoo Buzz isn't perfect - it is a select number of publishers (although still in my personal view much fairer to publishers than digg) and participation on the Buzz property itself is lower than on digg.
So it's not perfect... but the traffic it sends publishers is both bigger and more engaged with the original content than traffic sent by digg or slashdot.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Yahoo.com Sends a Ton of Talkative Traffic.
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Richard - I am a bit curious to know how these new visitors from Yahoo! follow your website later.
Do you see a jump in RSS feed subscribers or in the number of direct visitors (like people coming through browser bookmarks).
Posted by: Amit Agarwal | May 8, 2008 3:25 AMinteresting insights Richard - it's also important to note that Yahoo buzz is not open either and I've heard the only way in is to "know someone high up" - it does look like Federated has been able to get all of their sites in.
I am still hoping I get invited but there's no one to contact and only an email box so I have nowhere to turn for help.
Posted by: allen stern | May 8, 2008 3:52 AMI really only believe the surge in comments and success you have seen is due to the "new" and "wow" factor that Yahoo Buzz still has.
If you could shrink Digg back to it's earlier days, lock in only a handful of publishers and hurdle that traffic at those sites, they would have also seen tons of comments. The Yahoo.com page viewer is not inundated with thousands of interesting articles but only a few select amount.
Anyway, it is still great to hear how wonderful it must be on your side of the table being one of the select few publishers that can get an exclusive VIP. :P
Posted by: webaddict | May 8, 2008 4:07 AMthanks very nice blog.
Posted by: ekinoksforum | May 8, 2008 4:30 AMhello,
how can I submit a story on buzz?
Thanks!
Posted by: Ionela | May 8, 2008 7:35 AMRichard,
Thanks for all the insight you've given to the community on your post-Buzz effect. I'm inclined to agree with webaddict's sentiment somewhat - the fact that Yahoo Buzz is the new new thing is what is responsible for such high quality comment engagement.
That being said, it's difficult to compare Digg in the old days and their traffic/audience vs. the worldwide traffic beast the Yahoo is :)
Congrats on your first Buzz frontpage, and we greatly appreciate the link to our Wikipedia story!
Posted by: Brian Wallace - NowSourcing | May 8, 2008 8:31 AMI don't think Buzz being new and shiny has anything to do with the traffic it sends. Only an insignificantly tiny percentage of Yahoo users ever visit buzz.yahoo.com, but that tiny percentage is enough to vote on stories which get them enough buzz to be featured on the front page and on My.Yahoo. Those two sites have an insane amount of traffic and the people clicking on these stories have absolutely no clue what Buzz is.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 8, 2008 9:05 AMThe Buzz site is just a pipeline of potential stories, it isn't where the traffic itself is coming from.
I never expected RWW to get uppity a la TechCrunch. I guess a little power goes to everyone's head.
Posted by: aahnold | May 8, 2008 9:05 AMI think the key to the number of comments made at Yahoo Buzz is due to the convenience of a single sign-in for Yahoo related services.
Posted by: Jonathan Kong | May 8, 2008 9:25 AMNot sure I would call it "social" since it is a closed system, but I agree with all your Digg comments. I used to love Digg, but I haven't been to the site in weeks. Yahoo Buzz has become my new 'source'.
Posted by: Arnie | May 8, 2008 9:27 AMI personally don't think the comments is a result of the newness at all. Yahoo's ALWAYS had one of the most engaged user bases of any mega site. They're typically near the top of most major metrics in average visit length - social networking sites and Ebay usually being the only major sites surpassing it.
The very essence and strength of Yahoo is its portal nature. Users can go to the site and browse Yahoo's network of content and properties for hours without ever having to leave the site. By contrast, most of Google's properties (YouTube , Orkut and Blogger being the most notable exceptions) offer a much more utilitarian experience. Effective and useful for sure. But not as engaging an experience. Each approach has its strengths and I'm not sure it's possible to be both.
Another reason I don't think the comments are due to newness . . . remember when Yahoo used to have comments on all their news stories? That was used/viewed by an absolutely MASSIVE pool of people. In fact, the comments got so big and out of control that they eventually decided to shut it down (despite the high level of interaction it gave them by keeping people on their site.) Their user base hasn't changed much since then so it's doubtful the level of engagement and behavior has changed much either. If anything it's gotten more talkative.
I DO Think the traffic will be influenced due to the newness though. With only a limited number of publishers vying for spots on Yahoo Buzz you're going to get a much higher share of the available traffic. Still, as far as potential audience pools go, it doesn't get any bigger so front page/section there should always be huge.
Posted by: RS | May 8, 2008 9:31 AMRichard, I have to disagree with your assessment of Slashdot readers' engagement. At least on Slashdot itself, those folks leave the most numerous, in-depth and worthwhile comments I've seen anywhere.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick@ Anonymouse: "insignificantly tiny percentage of Yahoo users"?
If even 1 Yahoo user was responsible for sending me 45,000 visitors, I would not call that user insignificant.
Congrats, Richard! That would probably have crashed most of us, which is why, I suspect, only certain blogs are eligible to participate just yet.
Posted by: Jon | May 8, 2008 11:09 AMNot meaning to spam the comments, but Marshall's comment about Slashdot commenters was posted at about the same time as my last one, and I didn't notice it. And, as you'll see, I could not let this one go:
@ Marshall: in honor of Slashdot commenters everywhere I am compelled to add:
I, for one, welcome our new Buzzed Overlords.
Man, I haven't been to /. in forever....
Posted by: Jon | May 8, 2008 11:14 AM@Marshall, I agree that Slashdot commenters leave great comments.... on Slashdot. Which is fine, but the Yahoo traffic is benefiting the original publishers. In a way it's kind of a distributed slashdot / digg (that may be stretching things a bit, but it feels that way).
Posted by: Richard MacManusThe reason for the quality of traffic is simple... 99.999% of these users have never seen RWW before and aren't on it every single day of the week. It's new to them. They also aren't the Twitter / Tech crowd, more reason this type of a story is new to them. They are curious, thoughtful, and engaged.
Contrast that to someone like me, very active on twitter, I hit RWW a couple times a day by following links, but rarely ever leave comments. When a story breaks, I'll see it on RWW and 10 other sites, and maaaaaybe one of those I'll leave a comment on (usually techcrunch, most discussion there).
For the Yahoo crowd, this is the only source they'll ever see for this story, speak now or forever hold your peace.
Regarding the "Buzz crowd is engaged" comments, these users didn't come from Buzz and likely have never even heard of it. Buzz is just a tool to get stories on the Yahoo.com homepage.
Posted by: Derek Gathright | May 8, 2008 12:24 PMInteresting numbers and results. I have to admit I never gave Yahoo Buzz much thought or spent too much time on it, so these numbers definitely come as a bit of a surprise.
I thought they'd, at best, perform like Ex-Netscape/Propeller in this area.
I guess the fact that they pull top stories to the Yahoo homepage is what makes all the difference.
Posted by: Mohamed Marwen Meddah | May 8, 2008 12:31 PMI was really delighted to see this post. I did a review of Yahoo Buzz myself on SEO Chat back in March, but at that time I didn't know how much of a "Buzz effect" there would be or how it would compare to Slashdot or Digg. Granted, we don't have a large sample here from which to generalize, but it looks to me like Yahoo got it right.
Posted by: Terri Wells | May 8, 2008 12:43 PMLets Buzz Instead of Digging....
Posted by: Gopinath M | May 8, 2008 1:31 PMThat's very interesting, I would have thought that the traffic from Yahoo would be of lesser quality - because it seems more geared towards entertainment gossip then technology. Sounds pretty decent, the only problem is that it's not open to small time bloggers in the way Digg is. In order to prevent spam, they isolate it to a closed-circle group of bloggers - which is rather unfortunate.
Posted by: Television Spy | May 8, 2008 8:38 PMFolks. As Richard mentioned in his post, the click throughs come from the front page of Yahoo!. It's just that buzz is used to figure out which stories to surface on the front page.
So, the users who click have no idea that "buzz is new and hence I have to click".
Y!Buzz is one of the most sensible products that has come out of Yahoo! in recent times. As some other folks said, may be due to the "portal" nature of Yahoo! and due to the fairly decent content on their site, the average Yahoo! user is always an engaged user.
So, don't just downplay Yahoo! just because "it's cool to do so". Where it makes sense, you should give credit to the company. And in this, I think they deserve all the credit.
Posted by: Gan | May 9, 2008 9:34 AM