PC Mag Still Gets More Traffic from Digg than Twitter
According to in-bound referral stats published by PC Mag’s AppScout blog Hellbound: Hellraiser II movie download
, Digg remains a much larger source of traffic than Twitter, at least for one recent story that was both Dugg and passed around via Twitter.
“Note the vast disparity between referrals from Digg versus those from Twitter. Sort of a surprise considering all we’re hearing about how broad and deep the adoption of Twitter is by all users of the Internets. Even a site I’ve never heard of, Jimmyr.com, managed to bring nearly eight times as many eyeballs as the favorite, supposedly skyrocketing microblog. And when I checked the referring numbers for the entire site, Twitter’s share of referrals held at 0.1 percent overall, too.” Apt Pupil dvdrip
AppScout recognizes the traffic-driving power of Twitter for brands like TechCrunch that have huge Twitter subscriber bases (nearly 900,000 in TechCrunch’s case). But:
“How many sites can claim such a stratospheric number of followers? It also belies the idea that Twitter is organically creating all that traffic.”
There’s a similar argument you could make against Digg if, say, 20,000 stories are posted to Digg and fewer than 200 of them make an appearance on Digg’s homepage in a given day. The difference is that Digg privileges the story item, regardless of who originally shares that story; Twitter privileges the “media company,” the Twitter publisher who decides a story is worth sharing.
I don’t know which approach is better (putting aside my Digg bias, since I work here), but Twitter appears to be following a more conventional approach to publishing: Influence is aggregating around a relatively small group of news distributors. Digg has its power Diggers, certainly, but the platform may allow for a more diverse and democratic model for disseminating the news.
Chas, I’ve read that 5x as many people access twitter thru 3rd part apps. So the traffic generated is much greater, but not represented in refer logs.
Is it possible that many of the twitter referral links look blank because they originate in a third party app? I bet the web traffic logs miss 90% of all twitter referral traffic because hardly anyone actually uses the twitter.com site for their daily consumption of twitter. That being said, Digg probably still wins out big, I’m just guessing that these stats aren’t accurate.
Jonas and Brian–That’s right. Per Evan Weaver, Twitter’s lead engineer in its services team, “only 20% of its traffic comes through the Twitter website; the other 80% (logically) comes from third-party programs on smartphones or computers. So if you’re looking at Twitter stats on your website, you’re probably underestimating that source of traffic by a factor of five” (via The Guardian UK, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jun/29/twitter-users-average-api-traffic). In the PC Mag example above, multiplying the Twitter numbers by 5 would take Twitter traffic up to 420 visits, still less than half a percentage of referral traffic.
[...] publishers have only 126 followers. For PC Mag (with fewer than 7000 followers), Twitter is a much less significant traffic source, less than one percent of visits to Google’s 4%. But like Fred Wilson’s [...]