OPEN

When Digg launched its news version a couple of weeks back, one assertion that sprang from a TechCrunch interview with the founders was that Digg was rivaling the New York Times for reach.

Heather Hopkins of Hitwise took a look at US data on the relative popularity of the sites (based on page impressions) and found that in fact the New York Times was 19 times more popular than Digg. She also dug (sorry) deeper to find that the demographics of the two sites are very different indeed:

Firstly, Digg attracts a different demographic audience than the NY Times. For the four weeks ending 7/1/06, 26% of Digg’s users were in the 18-24 age bracket, while only 9.5% of NY Times users were in that age group. NY Times skews much older, with 34% of its users in the 55+ age group. Only 10% of Digg’s users were over 55 in that time period.

Secondly, Digg received 63% of its traffic from search engines during the four weeks ending 7/1/06, compared to 16% for the NY Times, and analysis of the actual terms reveal the differences in how people are using the sites. Very little of Digg’s search volume was navigational, indicating low brand recognition. Take a look at the top 20 search terms sending visits to Digg shown below, and you’ll get an idea of their audience – definitely young and tech focused. Half of the NY Times’ top 20 search terms in the same period were navigational terms like ‘newyorktimes’ and they accounted for 13% of its search volume. Other terms sending visits to NY Times in that period included ‘star jones,’ ‘world cup,’ ‘tony awards’ and ‘obituaries,’ further demonstrating the wide gulf between Digg users and NY Times users.

Heather’s final judgement is that Digg "it is still an early-adopter site and will take some time to gain traction with mainstream internet users."

I’m grateful for her reality check. It’s the sort of impressive stat that can undermine your credibility if you were to use it without qualification or checking its accuracy first.

Digg is an incredible site and a staggeringly brilliant model for news communities, but despite the  big numbers, it is still early days in some respects and we’re best to remember that. 

Tags: digg, hitwise, aggregators, new york times