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1 CommentsReading feeds I noticed that Read/Write/Web wrote an article about The Decline and Fall of Tech on Digg.
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%.
I read that and cracked up laughing. Digg is much more mainstream than it was before. Top it off, this is an election year, we have a war going on, the economy sucks...wouldn't it be weird if the top news was something other than world and business when their user base submits the articles and votes them to the front page?
And let's not mention it sort of stopped being a tech news site when it added new categories.
Statistics are so misleading sometimes, which is probably why I don't pay too much attention to them. Yesterday I was talking to a blogger interested in joining 9rules and she bragged about having over 500 subscribers (Feedburner stats). I dutifully congratulated her. Then I asked her how many of those readers actually read her articles?
She didn't understand. I chuckled to myself.
I patiently explained that the FB number only shows how many RSS readers pulled the feed, which definitely does not translate into how many people read the content. She was stunned because she assumed that the number meant those people pulled and read her content, and I can understand how she thought that.
Statistics are ok, taken in the right context. A cool Twitter site called Twitterholic will show the history of how many followers/friends a person has over time.
Back to Digg, I don't use Digg much and a lot of "techy" people I know moved away from it too...so the site could be experiencing a double-whammy. It seems like Twitter can bring significant traffic just like Digg.
Reading Jason's article (laughing), I completely forgot why I wrote this. My bad...
Scrivs
Written Apr. 17, 2008 / Report /
You are right in that statistics are misleading. The fact that tech has dropped on Digg is a sign of that because I wouldn't say that Digg has gone more mainstream, but that the geeks like the crazy, sensationalists articles more than the other stuff. Sure they love Tech, but there are only so many tech stories that can come out everyday. During CES or any Apple event look at the page then and you will see Tech dominating.
The mainstream still doesn't know about Digg and never will considering the people that are on there.
RSS subscriber numbers are probably the most bunked ones out there, right next to Alexa rankings. You wanna see an artificial boost in your FeedBurner numbers get linked up somewhere and magically see how your numbers go up for a couple of days. Why? Firefox and their auto-feed features or whatever the hell they are.
Either way when dealing with statistics you should never look at one set of numbers as the definitive result. Statistics actually implies that you have many different numbers to look at from different angles to draw a reasonable conclusion because 90% of statistics can be manipulated to look right 50% of the time.