Analysis: What Type of Content Is Most Popular On Digg, Reddit, Propeller, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon?
Ever wonder what kind of content is most popular on the various social news sites? Well wonder no more…
We analysed over 500 front-page stories for Digg, Reddit, Propeller, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us to try and determine what type of content is generally popular on each site (Note: this is 500+ stories for each site not the total).
Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon and Propeller all seem to only include the popular stories in their feeds. Reddit may also include stories that get votes rapidly over a short period of time. The results are based on RSS feed data so some stories may have been buried after we included them.
For Digg, Reddit and Propeller we used the existing sub-categories on each of the sites for the graphs. For StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us we categorised the stories ourselves. (The category types can be seen above the Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon graphs)
We used the RSS function on Google Spreadsheets and manually copied the data into Excel spreadsheets every 3 hours or so. I’m sure people with programming knowledge can whip up a fancy application that does the grunt work for you, but we didn’t have any of those people at hand. If anyone has a better way to do this, please share it in the comments section.
We looked at the various sites on the same day, however, due to some sites updating their RSS feeds more regularly than others this wasn’t possible. Digg and Propeller have lots of front-page stories in a day while Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon update much slower (well, they do in Google Spreadsheets anyway).
It should be remembered that by analysing 500+ stories for each site that this is quite a small number in comparison to the number of stories that get promoted on these sites on a monthly basis.
While it’s still only a small number of stories that we analysed, it should still give a useful indication as to the type of content that is popular on the various sites. We’ll try to do this on a monthly basis and see if there is much difference to these figures over the coming months.
Digg
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Propeller
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The following categories are what we based the Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon graphs on. It’s probably not the most scientific way to categorize the popular articles, but it should give you a general indication of the type of articles people like to read on each site.
Tutorials/ Resources - Tutorials, “how to” and resource guides etc..
Videos - Youtube, Metacafe etc..
Offbeat/Bizarre - Weird, crazy, bizarre, humorous stories etc..
Environment - Green issues, conservation, pollution, etc..
Technology - Technology, gadgets, cars, websites
Politics - Any political news or opinions
Business/ Make Money - How to make money online, business advice, freelancing, money saving tips etc…
Science -New scientific findings, space etc..
Lifestyle - Fashion, health, religion/atheism (you could argue that religion/atheism are better suited to another category, but we felt this was the best category for it to go in)
Arts - Music, photography, design etc..
News - Breaking news and other news items from places like BBC, CNN, newspapers etc..
Del.icio.us
StumbleUpon
We hope this data finds good use. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave your comments below.
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34 Readers have left their thoughts
justin
it’s interesting how the different social bookmarking sites seem to have audiences with specific niches.
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Dec 30th, 2007
reputation management
this is very important info
some of the statistics are not surprising but others blow you away
way to go on this article.
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Dec 30th, 2007
Glen Allsopp
Nice work, must have taken you a lot of time
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Dec 30th, 2007
Fiar
It would be more helpful if the analysis of “politics” indicated a slant or bias. What percentage Dem, Repub, or Ron Paul? That would certainly make a big difference.
Other than that, nice analysis.
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Dec 31st, 2007
Always
Really cool thanks for taking the time….
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Dec 31st, 2007
Hooper
Thought humour or comedy would be up there…is that offbeat
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Jan 3rd, 2008
Nick (Admin)
We’ve received a few emails asking for a clearer graph for Propellor. Some people are never happy are they
? Anyway, new graph updated.
Happy New Year!
/Nick
[reply to this comment]
Jan 3rd, 2008
Chris (admin)
Hi - we’ve had a few problems with a couple of sites this week and lost some comments because our back-up didn’t work - but the breakdown of the politics section that FIAR asked for will be posted early next week.
@Hooper - yeah, the offbeat section contains the humour/comedy articles. Hope that helps
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Jan 4th, 2008
SMASHINGAPPS.COM
Its really cool. Thanks for sharing this.
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Jan 7th, 2008
Jonathan
Came across Social Media Trader via one of the feeds in my reader. Wealthy amount of essential information on the subject of social media. Thanks for this article too!
[reply to this comment]
Feb 18th, 2008
Chris (admin)
@Smashing Apps and @Jonathan - thanks for commenting - glad you both found it useful.
We have completed the stats for January 2008, you can see these in the link below, thanks
http://socialmediatrader.com/social-news-and-social-bookmark-monthly-statistics-january-2008/
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Feb 18th, 2008
TheMystical
Interesting stuff, good job
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May 24th, 2008
Terah
Good for people to know.
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Oct 28th, 2008
jimmy s
personally i use the service ://URLFAN and their Buzz Radar which to me is more transparent in regards to whats going on the blogosphere
http://www.urlfan.com/site/buzz_100/600.html
urlfan crunches all the data from over a couple million rss feeds and tracks what’s moving in the blogosphere. there’s no human intervention so it’s able to float top stories faster than the standard vote up/down digg and reddit use. according to alexa, urlfan is about to overtake reddit in terms of reach and rank so they must be doing something right.
[reply to this comment]
Dec 19th, 2008
tech mogo
Jimmy - thanks for the link; that url site looks pretty handy…
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Jan 22nd, 2009
free samples girl
anything liberal agenda ranks popular on digg
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Feb 15th, 2009
Social Media Website
Great information. Tech, news and politics seems to be popular.
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Jun 25th, 2009
Alex Wu
Judging from this, I’d have to say that digg and reddit seems like it’s mostly tech savvy males, where Stumbleupon is more for the normal people.
[reply to this comment]
Jul 10th, 2009