Digg vs Flickr vs Wordpress
November 20th, 2006 by Ian
Which Web 2.0 site is the most popular? I’ll use two methods to find out…
Following the number of searches may be inaccurate because some sites don’t get as much traffic from search engines relative to others, but it does show what people what to find and are actively typing in, so it has merit.
Provided by Google trends
Flickr clearly takes the cake on Google searches, but let’s take a look at the traffic (Alexa Rank) as well…
Provided by Alexa.com
There was a strange spike in April for all three sites benefiting digg and flickr the most, but wordpress had made up the difference since. Among these three sites, Flickr clearly dominates both traffic and searches. With Digg and Wordpress, the pattern is understandable. Many people use wordpress for their blog (like this one) and search for plugins, help, and themes. Although these WP users go to the WP site often, they also can find what they need from other sites (most plugins are on various blogs.) Digg is different because if you are searching digg, you generally want to see digg’s top stories and will end up on their site.
To determine second and third place, because of the split here let’s take a look behind the numbers. Which site appeals to a wider audience or are the numbers at all skewed? How about the fact the a relative few of digg’s users provide much of the content on digg’s front page? Are the articles really a wide range of articles? Maybe they aren’t supposed to be, but are they even as democratic as it seems? This article says the top 100 users control over half of Digg’s front page content! I google’d “digg manipulation” and found this in the digital point forums. Interesting, but not surprising. But some say digg doesn’t even represent a user-driven site. I think there is some validity to this, but the point is people go to digg because they want to, not necessarily believe that is really is user-driven and fair. Certain types of people go to digg; my guess is that some people believe it is really fair and used to get the latest tech news, and some use it as a game to build traffic to one’s site. For these reasons, I will give to give second place to wordpress.
