• by dave.b , Max Kalehoff , July 14, 2006

Senior analyst LeeAnn Prescott of Hitwise, a Web measurement firm I used to consult for, recently poured some cold water on a highly misguided debate in the blogosphere about whether Digg.com is potentially as big as the NYTimes.com. Digg is a captivating social news aggregator where members of its community vote on which stories will be featured on the front page; NYTimes.com, of course, is the online version of the New York Times. As Prescott recently reported on her blog:

According to the Hitwise U.S. sample of 10 million internet users, Digg ranked at #101 in the News & Media category in for the week ending July 1, 2006. The share of page impressions for the NYTimes was 19 times greater than for Digg for that week. If I put the New York Times on the same chart as Digg, Digg's traffic would look tiny and relatively flat, even though its share of page impressions has grown substantially in the past several months, increasing 51 percent from February to June 2006. Digg did receive a greater share of page impressions in June than Times Select, the subscriber-only section of the NY Times, and long ago eclipsed Slashdot, as you can see on this chart .

While Digg is far from a mega-mainstream Web destination, it has disproportionate influence on search-engine results and blog memes, primarily in the tech and social-media world. Moreover, Digg's tendency to periodically extend beyond its core audience by uncovering and virally launching niche content into mainstream is certainly compelling.

If I were an online publisher, or a PR person, I'd be spending a lot of time studying how this idea catalyst works and can be leveraged. Digg may not be in the top-10 rankings of all publisher sites, but it can act as a forceful fire hose of content to high-reaching mainstream channels. Similar to many influential blogs and online communities, Digg is becoming an intermediary to traditional information gatekeepers.

For example, when Vincent Ferrari submitted to Digg an MP3 recording of his excruciating experience trying to cancel his AOL service with a retention specialist, thousands of people "Dugg" him. This exposed his story and helped catapult it across the Internet, landing on NBC's "Today" show, and getting covered in the New York Times and many other places.

So what makes Digg tick? It could be argued the Digg network often operates like the U.S. government: it's governed by and reflects topical extremists who sometimes have too much time on their hands. Extreme bloggers. Extreme techies. Extreme hackers. Extreme fans of strange or sensational news. Extreme fans of weird but interesting YouTube videos. I admit I fall into a few of those camps.

There is a tiny epicenter of Digg members which jockeys intensively for the rewards and gratification of being Dugg. I'm not implying Digg is flawed or bad, because it's actually a powerful and elegant system for discovering interesting content and emerging trends. It's like a highly observable watercooler on steroids. However, it's not a utopian democracy where the entire nation votes; it is a practical democracy where a few hand-raisers passionately do most of the work, and where motivations are often guided by agenda or ego. The outcome sometimes is significant.

So while Digg's site audience may not be mega-mainstream, its share of discussion in the blogosphere and beyond definitely is. In fact, Digg's share of mentions in the blogosphere is coming within range of NYTimes, one of the most linked and discussed sources in the blogosphere.

Provided the blogosphere's disproportionate influence on agenda-setting and idea dispersion across a variety of topical categories, the Digg Web site's reach and audience size is probably the wrong metric to focus on in the first place. Influence and affinity is critical, especially when you consider the potential multiplier effect. The fact is, Digg is among a cadre of emerging publishing and social-media hybrids that is likely to drive another major wave of serious disruption in our traditional models of media, marketing, news and PR. Do you agree? Give Digg a try and let me know what you think.