Has digg become as mainstream as BusinessWeek and People Magazine? ReadWriteWeb argues that the social news site is headed in that direction, if it’s not there already. According to RWW’s studies (along with some of Richard Cunningham’s compelling graphical analysis), digg and its community of diggers have strayed from the site’s tech roots, the number of frontpage tech-reated stories on the site halving each year. The graph above created by Cunningham shows the steady decline of the ratio of tech stories to all digg content over the last two years. RWW reports:
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%.
We took a look at digg for ourselves – and while we were a bit surprised to see this photo of one of the “most hardcore male names ever” leading the top articles in the last 24 hrs list (with 5879 diggs and counting), we were happy to also see RWW’s critique featured in the “Top in All Topics” section on digg’s frontpage.
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