Beyond Politics, Digg Fails To Expand

November 20, 2006

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We are big fans of Digg and the idea behind it, but a survey of the top content on the Digg site told us something we had already thought was true: that beyond politics, Digg was having trouble building popularity for its new subject areas in the same way it has managed to get Diggers participate in Technology news.

A quick survey of total Diggs on the front page of ‘Top Today’ stories across subject areas – Sat Nov 18 9pm

EST :

Technology – 11,489 Diggs
Gaming – 9,729
Videos – 6,080
Science – 4,195
Entertainment – 2,859
World & Business – 2,465
Sports – 737

At first look, that might look like some of the new areas such as videos are growing, but if we adjust the numbers to take into remove technology and political news from the Diggs in non-Tec and non-Gaming categories we get the following:

Technology – 11,489 Diggs
Gaming – 9,729
Science – 4,195
Entertainment – 2,859
Videos Without Tech – 2597 (by tag or content)
World & Business without Politics – 1206 (by tag)
Sports – 737

Since we trailed Marktd we have formed an opinion that the concept of voting isn’t that appealing to marketing and advertising people – they have no need to show off their number of votes as their standing in their real-life social circle is far more important than their virtual one. Diggers meanwhile seem to use their ‘votes’ and ‘number of articles published’ as a way of creating social status. This might be peculiar to tech fans – and the voting concept seems to also appeal to political pundits.