Lets compare apples to apples and leave the oranges out of this. Part 2
In Part one of this series, we took a look at the Mixx being a copy cat of Digg and how that argument, well isn’t an argument. In this part, as promised, we’ll play with some numbers and look at a little data analysis to answer that age old question; Is Digg really bigger than Mixx, or any other social news site?
Spend enough time on a few technology blogs and social media blogs and eventually you’ll run into the “Mixx vs Digg vs Reddit vs Alien vs the Predator” article. Personally I’ll put my money on either the Alien or the Predator, but lets leave them out so we can level the playing field. The comments on that hypothetical article tend to dismiss Mixx because its “small” and digg is so much bigger. Here’s a small sample (actual comments):
Many Digg users are leaving Digg to join Mixx? Get your facts straight! Digg has 15M+ users, Mixx has 45K users or .003% of the Digg numbers.
I think Diggers are all over since Digg is such a large site
Since the first commenter I posted wants to play the numbers game lets do so now. He defends digg by using the number of users it has, and I assume that comes from compete.com. We can even help him out by taking a quick look at Alexa and really see how big Digg is.
By looking at the graph one could only come to one conclusion. Digg is King. Digg is the leader and make no mistake about that. Well this is true, and they do have a lot of users, but a few people are leaving out a crucial piece of information when drawing their conclusions; time. Digg has more than 3 years on Mixx, so its a given they have more users. One can even see Propeller and Reddit have more users because they have a few years on Mixx. That’s like an adult walking up to a kid and saying “I’m bigger than you”. You don’t say.
So lets pick a fair point to compare the two, the beginning. The tiny box is roughly equal to the 3 month period Mixx has been around, so it is the length of time by which the beginning of each social new site is measured.
The closeup view is interesting in what it displays, digg is not really king when looking at the beginning. Now to be fair to digg, social news was new when it first came on the scene, but its growth was very sluggish in the 3 month window. Reddit actually shows a much healthier growth than digg. Its not fair to include Propeller because while it shows they arrived about the same time as Mixx, they were once Netscape so they had some users in their pockets indicated by the astronomical growth depicted in the graph. Mixx has a similiar growth pattern as Reddit, its somewhat sluggish, but raises very quickly in a burst of new traffic.
So by comparing each site based on their starting point is a much fairer comparison and shows that the, user claimed king of social news, wasn’t so king like in the beginning.
Looking at the larger graph one sees that the stellar growth peaked and has been preceded by two large drops in traffic. One of those drops is the HD-DVD key revolt and the next is most likely the bannings. I guess its hard to be King, huh?
NOTE: This article comes a bit late (about a month) considering the Mixx vs Digg fight has calmed quite a bit.
*** Update ****
The comments above mention Mixx with 45K users. This was a comment posted 2 months ago, so its a little out dated. Mixx users number around 145K according http://siteanalytics.compete
Very well written article BDog. But you know despite of your valid points, people will still compare these sites to one another. But it would be cool to see Mixx overthrow the others, I’m rooting for the under-dog!