Not only has the number of page views gone up from 250 million in the month of January 2010 to 829 million in December 2010, but also the average amount of time spent per visit has gone up from 12 minutes and 41 seconds to 15 minutes and 21 seconds.

The increase in time spent on the site, indicates that not only are new visitors accessing the site, but they also must like the format enough to spend a substantial amount of time there.

In fact, Reddit has been growing so rapidly, that they often have to struggle for their servers to keep up with the increased user demands. They have also decided to increase the strength of the engineering team from 4 to 6.

Part of the reason for the growth of the site could be their new and improved features and upgrades as also the fact that Reddit allows users to form new communities which enable users to discuss various topics of interest to them with each other.

However, the major factor of this sudden growth could well be the sudden downfall of Digg.

Digg has suffered a major setback since their last redesign in August-September 2010. Following this, a lot of users have deserted the site and no doubt a substantial chunk of those users would now be patronising Reddit.

In an interview with TechCrunch founder, Michael Arrington, Kevin Rose said that the team at Digg have made some mistakes with the site lately and this has led to a substantial fall in their popularity.

About a month ago, they launched a new version of the Digg user interface, dubbed Digg v4. This new site design has not been appreciated by Digg’s ardent users, largely due to major changes in its functionality. A poll on Mashable found that most users preferred the old site even though the changes were meant to make Digg more social and less of a closed network dominated by a few “power users”.

Since the new version of Digg was launched, a large number of its regular users started submitting stories to flood the Top News page with direct links to their competitor, Reddit. As a result, traffic to Reddit shot up and Digg raffic has suffered.

Daily Unique Visitors (cookies) to Digg versus Reddit
Source: Google DoubleClick Ad Planner

Digg has had three different Chief Executives during the span of just six months. Some employees have also been laid off due to the problems the company is currently facing.

Under the circumstances, Kevin Rose has admitted to being quite tired and upset with the situation. He even went so far as to mention that he had been in favour of accepting a takeover bid worth about $80 million ($60 million plus earnout) when Digg was at the peak of its popularity, but his board of directors had turned down the offer at the time.

Rose has even refused to confirm whether or not he would continue to be associated with Digg by the end of this year.

Facebook accounts for nearly half the traffic generated from social networks and other social media sites, contributing to 48% of the total. The next largest referrer is StumbleUpon, which sends 25% of the total social media traffic. Twitter ranks third and accounts for 10% of the traffic sent from social sites.

Top 7 Social Media sites that referred traffic to global websites in Jan – Mar 2010.

StatCounter has arrived at these figures after analysing 13 billion page views from all their member sites. Their CEO, Aodhan Cullen, says, “From a business perspective the findings suggest that there is merit in having a corporate Facebook page or Twitter account.”

Quite surprisingly, StumbleUpon has managed to remain the second largest driver of social media traffic through the last year. In the U.S.A; it was the topmost source of social traffic in March.

YouTube, reddit, Digg and MySpace are next in line, in terms of driving traffic, with 6%, 4%, 2% and 2% contribution to total social media referrals respectively.

However, Cullen warns that the social media market is known to fluctuate quite sharply and during the last Christmas and New Year season, Facebook was not only at the top but accounted for almost 75% of the traffic referrals.

Last year, the top three slots were occupied by StumbleUpon, Facebook and MySpace, in thet order.

Now, with the recent introduction of Annotations and @anywhere by Twitter and the ‘Like’ button by Facebook the situation could change all over again.

Realtime search service OneRiot, which is in talks with Yahoo! to provide them with realtime search, is also tying up with mobile search engine, Taptu, to deliver realtime search services to mobile Internet users. Taptu will make use of OneRiot’s API to provide these realtime search results.

OneRiot has already started developing additional APIs that will be able to provide relevant ads on mobile handsets, thus monetising the service. The service collects realtime results from various sources such as Twitter, Digg and Facebook.

Taptu has added a new feature on it homepage, which is essentially a search engine interface compatible with mobile browsers. The homepage has a search box with options to search the Web, Images and now, ‘Buzz’, which is where the realtime search results will be provided.

Buzz search is currently available on all iPhone, iPod Touch, G1 (Android), Blackberry Storm 1, Nokia N97 and 5800 handsets. All other devices still show the old search interface, which provides the option of ‘All’, images, video and music searches.

Until now, mobile users could access realtime search results by searching for trending topics on Twitter. However, this new service will certainly be more direct and efficient.

Mobile users with compatible handsets can test the service at:

www.taptu.com

Stopping link juice from flowing out from Digg to dubious sites became a necessity, in some ways, due to the spread of spammy material on the site.

The nofollow attribute will be added to all external links, comments, user profiles and story pages whose popularity happens to be below a particular threshold limit set by Digg.

Digg submissions that cross the required threshold will automatically have the nofollow attribute removed from the link pointing to the articles.

This way, spam-based content on the site should be reduced, while still allowing good quality content to benefit the content owners with search engine friendly links to the publisher’s site.

A number of experts from the SEO industry have been involved in the creation and derision of the rel=”nofollow” search engine robot directive. Digg has had a few run-ins with these professionals and the rebots instruction method in the not-too-distant past when they launched the DiggBar.

SEO professionals are mostly in agreement with Digg on this new system, though. It allows the site to give credit where credit is due and not penalise everyone, like Twitter is doing, because of problems created by spammers.

Google uses a similar policy on Knol: Authors who regularly contribute and are thus well-known and trusted get their links freed of nofollow, while those who are new, need to gain the trust required before the nofollow attribute is removed from their links.

Digg’s Nofollow Criteria

Digg has not officially specified, however, what the threshold of reliability is.

As of now, all profile links are nofollowed, even for extremely popular and trusted Digg users, all newly submitted links are also nofollowed, even if they have been submitted by power users and all sponsored links are nofollowed – which was probably done to keep Google happy.

The only links that have nofollow removed from them at present are those that make it to the homepage, category popular pages or sub category popular pages.

Even the most dugg upcoming or ‘Hot In’ category / sub-category stories have the nofollow attribute on them.

The criteria for getting rel=”nofollow” removed from a link, at present, seems to be simply making it reach the ‘Popular’ list, which is the homepage or the individual category / sub-category main pages.

Users will have a considerable say in what kind of ads they want to see. Just as they can vote up or down any articles, videos etc. on the site, they will be able to do the same with the ads. The ads will however be clearly marked as sponsored content.

Thus, the more popular an ad is, the more it will be voted up, while the less popular an ad is the more that ad will be ‘buried’ or voted down. Accordingly advertisers will be charged at a higher rate for the less popular ads, and will be charged at lower rates for the more popular ads. This way, eventually, the advertisers would decide to discontinue the unpopular ads, as they will not work out to be cost effective.

Through this service, Digg is making sure that their audiences get to see ads that they are interested in, and advertisers will try their best to produce ads which users will like.

There is, of course, a slight possibility that users may decide that they do not want to see ads on Digg, and therefore start ‘burying’ all ads.

Digg will initially roll out the ads gradually to a few users, and based on their feedback, make appropriate changes in the service. Over the course of the next few months the facility will be made available to all users.

However, recently some changes seem to have been made in this arrangement, whereby, the links are directed to Digg, instead of going to the publisher site, even if the users are not signed in on Digg.

As a result, thousands of users are pushing traffic to Digg, instead of to the original site that they wanted to link to, without even being aware of it.

Initially those who experienced this change wondered if this was an intentional change, or an error on the part of Digg. It has now been confirmed, via an email from Digg Support to Mashable, that this is an intentional change, and is “working as planned”.

This change will also be applicable to Digg URL’s that were created previously.

Digg has made these changes without informing their users. As a result, thousands of Digg users have no knowledge of the fact that they are diverting their followers to Digg instead of the intended site, which seems quite unethical, and is very likely to upset the publishers who happen to be Digg’s main source of content and traffic.

Digg founder, Kevin Rose has pleaded ignorance of these changes as he was on vacation for two weeks, and he says he will look into the matter.

They have now released some details of what the new system should comprehend, through an interview with the LA Times. Their primary concern is that the new tool should focus on conversation, and not on Diggs.

Digg CEO, Jay Adelson says, “a tool that would focus on actual conversations, rather than the mass dumping of links that polluted Shouts. Digg is considering making a ‘one-to-one’ service. It’s not so much a sharing problem. It’s more of a communication problem, where I have one user who wants to talk to another user.”

In other words, the open broadcast links of Shout, where lots of people send links to one post, will be replaced by a system where individuals connect with each other.

The tool will also be category based, i.e. people sharing a common interest such as movies, sports etc. will be able to communicate with each other.

This way, Digg is hopeful of being able to delete, the ‘please Digg my link’ feature, and thus avoid all the confusion and spamming which occurred on Shout.

Just as users vote up or down the news stories on Digg as per their preference, they will now be in a position to vote up or down the ads displayed on the site.

If users like an ad they Digg it (vote it up). If they do not like the ad, it gets voted down. Digg will then decide the rates they charge their advertisers, depending on the number of votes an ad generates. If an ad is really popular, it will garner more votes. Such an ad will be charged at a lower cost per click rate, compared to ads which garner fewer votes and are relatively unpopular.

In turn, an advertiser is likely to display a popular ad for a longer length of time, than he would display an unpopular ad, as he would have to pay a higher amount for the unpopular ad.

The ads will appear alongside the main stories and will be clearly demarcated as sponsored content. They will be linked to the main story, trailer or product review.

It will still be quite some months before this platform is launched as it is still in the early planning stages.

Even after it is launched, Digg will look out for user feedback, to further modify the platform as required.

It was found that the feature was being misused by some users, who only promoted their own posts by spamming others by sending out shouts.

Digg has now introduced a share feature, which allows users to share stories, images, videos or whatever information they wish to share with their contacts through sites like Twitter and Facebook. They can also email the stories to their friends.

The announcement was formally made by Digg founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson during a Digg Townhall broadcast.

The Digg blog states that this decision was made based on feedback received from users. Shouts have been a controversial feature since their inception and considering the ever-changing landscape of the social web Digg elected to remove them in favor of more popular social sharing options.

Users will now have to make use of the ‘share’ feature, which has been added on the homepage and then choose the mode of sharing i.e. Twitter, Facebook or email.

According to the LA Times blog, Digg is still looking for the perfect solution to replace shouts and allow their users to communicate with each other without allowing some to abuse the system.

Digg has also discontinued their ‘blog this’ feature, as it was not really popular.

Digg has now launched a new product called the ‘DiggBar’, which appears at the top of the browser whenever users click on any story on Digg. The DiggBar is portable to any website, making social news sharing much easier, but ways to exploit it are already cropping up.

The quasi-toolbar provides a lot of facilities to make it easier to Digg content. The DiggBar allows users to Digg content directly on a site, instead of having to move back and forth repeatedly, between the destination site and the Digg submission page.

Screenshot of DiggBar above a story on BBC.co.uk.

In order to view the DiggBar, users need to merely type “http://dig.com/” before the webpage address. A short URL will be created for that page and theDiggBar will appear at the top, framing the page.

Users can share interesting stories, via email, Twitter and Facebook, easily through the DiggBar. They can also see the top comment, the latest comment and the most controversial comment posted for the story on Digg, while still on the story page.

The DiggBar also shows the number of Diggs, pageviews for the page, related stories, and other stories from the same site on Digg.

Much like the StumbleUpon bar, the DiggBar includes a ‘Random’ button that brings up a random Digg story for users to browse and rate.

Users of the Twitter desktop application ‘Twhirl’ can expect an update, which will allow them to use Digg as their default short URL service.

While all of this is largely positive news for the once darling of social media, the DiggBar is already being exploited by some. As Michael Gray points out, the DiggBar frames a page and assigns it a Digg.com URL, which can be exploited for SEO benefit by unscrupulous affiliate publishers.

Digg claims to have 36 million unique visitors, making it one of the most popular social news sites. However, StumbleUpon is growing in popularity silently and Twitter, with 6 million users, is generating a lot more publicity off-late and is even being pegged as a serious search destination and a source of real-time news.

Once thought to be the next big thing and a likely acquisition target for Google and Microsoft, Digg is now just another old Web 2.0 era site – it’s not going downhill, but it’s yesterday’s news. All rumours and interest in the site have died down a bit. The new toolbar seems to have finally kicked some life back into Digg.

The new toolbar and associated status bar icon take the functionality of the current Firefox browser add-on, shown below, further. The current toolbar add-on tells users how many Diggs and comments a particular has received. The status bar icon pops up notifications of popular stories and related stories on the site.

Digg Firefox Add-On

The current version of the toolbar allows users to customise the topics for which they receive recommendations. Clicking the Digg button currently takes users to the Digg site, where they then log in and Digg the story.

Future versions are expected to allow users to Digg stories from the toolbar itself, just like StumbleUpon allows users to vote from the toolbar itself.

Rumours spread last week talked about a new software-free toolbar, pictured below, similar to the one from StumbleUpon, being in the works. The new toolbar has a large orange “random” button in the top corner of the page taking users to random sites, again in the same manner as StumbleUpon does.

StumbleUpon launched their software-free toolbar five months ago and have since reported a substantial growth in the number of its users. Digg surely hopes to be able to do the same.

The toolbar also has a TinyURL-like facility, that is the toolbar can create a shortened URL for each page. These URLs will begin with ‘http://digg.com/ followed by a six character code, which automatically gets used when the page is shared through Twitter or Facebook. This could be a great advantage to Digg as the shortened URL will be created with a single click of the mouse after typing http://digg.com/ in front of the URL.

There is no confirmation yet on when this toolbar will be released for general use.

Currently, Digg has 70 members on the payrolls, and they hope to expand to 150 over the next year or so.

They are reported to have about 16 million worldwide unique monthly visitors and 58 million page views according to Comscore.

Quantacast on the other reports about 22.6 million unique monthly visitors.

However since Digg does not have any editorials, the main job at this site is to moderate the content being posted by users and to concentrate on community affairs. It is believed that the site can be run efficiently, with much below half the present number of employees.

So then, why the plans to expand at a time when the financial position is so poor? In fact if they reduce the staff significantly they can turn the losses into profits.

This point leads us to wonder, if Digg is secretly up to something.

Unnamed sources, associated with the company have said that development and operations engineers are working on a product, which would be similar to Google AdWords, but would allow Digg to insert relevant ads into their news stream.

Users will be able to vote on these ads, thus “ranking” them. Ads which get a higher ranking, will be placed on a higher level, and will be charged a lower rate per click.

If this product is a success, it could definitely help to generate profits. For now Digg has refused to confirm or deny the story.

The Recommendation Engine is a suggestion tool that shows users new content on the site that they may be interested in. The Digg technicians found that it was not an easy task for users to find stories that would be of importance to them, as the ‘Upcoming’ section of Digg now receives an input of over 16,000 new articles on a daily basis.
Through the services of the Recommendation Engine, Digg recommends articles that a particular user may be interested in, based on records of the user’s past Digging activity. In other words, the type of stories that a person has been inclined to Digg in the past are more likely to be shown.

Users are categorised into groups of “Diggers like you”. This enables users to find other like-minded Diggers and then send stories to one another. The list of ‘Diggers like you’ is visible in the right hand column on the page, along with a compatibility rating.

Now that this trial has been going on for a month, Digg has released some stats about the trial, which are very encouraging. They find that Digging activity has gone up by about 40 percent since the launch of the Recommendation Engine.

The Recommendation Engine generates about 54 million recommendations at any given time, with each user receiving nearly 200 recommendations, from an average of 34 people in that group of ‘Diggers like you’.

Digg reports that interaction between friends has also gone up, by nearly 24 percent, and the comments received on the site have gone up by 11 percent.

Based on feedback received by Digg, they will be making some further improvements in the format by including more stories in the Recommendation Engine widget, on the homepage, lengthening the time frame of the Digging window from its current setting of 30 days and making changes in the back-end algorithm to make better recommendations to users.

The two firms were in an advanced stage of negotiations, and the price being quoted was in the range of $200 million.

Google was looking into the technical and financial aspects of Digg. Michael Arrington from TechCrunch explains that usually, by this stage the buyer knows pretty well what they are getting into, but since there is no firm commitment even at the term sheet stage, it is always possible to walk out for any reason.

No official reason has been given for calling off the deal at this late stage of discussions, but one undisclosed source says that it was due to some technical glitch, that the deal did not materialize, while another source reports that there were differences of perspective and ideology between the two companies, that led to the break down of talks.

It is possible, according to Arnold Zafra at Search Engine Journal, that Google just realised that this deal may not really help them to generate more revenue, which would obviously be their bottom line.

Whatever the reason may be, it looks as though Digg has been ditched at the last minute, yet again, and this might make it difficult for them to find a new buyer, as most companies would wonder what the problem was. Digg are supposedly looking to Allen & Co. to help them get some new financing for now.

In what seems like more than just a coincidence, Google started testing a Digg-like voting system for its own organic search results just last week. One might almost wonder – even though it obviously would not be the case – could Google have just freely borrowed ideas from Digg and then walked away once they got what they needed?

A video demonstrating this new search results page feature can be see on TechCrunch. A screenshot has been provided below, also courtesy of TechCrunch:

Users of the new search results test page are able to express their opinions of the search results by moving them up or down at will – by using the thumbs up or down icon. If the user votes a result down, it disappears and turns into an inconspicuous link at the bottom of the page, while if they vote it up, it will move up the search results.

Comments posted alongside individual search results listings are also being tested simultaneously by Google. Individual comments can also be upgraded or downgraded by other users. Clicking on the username of the person who posted the comment will show their Google account profile.

The new interface incorporates a lot of Digg’s most popular features. This has sparked off rumours that Google might be looking to acquire Digg, though this seems odd given that Google can already replicate Digg‘s functionality on their search results, as can be clearly seen in this test.

Google has been working on this project for a long time now, but it is only in the last few days, that users have been given an experience of what the new interface will look like. It will still be quite some time before the finished product is released, if ever, but it does give search marketers and some users a hint of things to come.

Yahoo! Buzz

Stories on Buzz will initially be seeded from 100 pre-approved publishers. However, once the system is out of beta more publishers will be invited to share their content and get traffic from the site.

Users can “Buzz” up a story that they find interesting. Every time a user clicks on the Buzz button alongside a story, its Buzz Score is incremented. The search term popularity and the number of times a story is emailed from Buzz also count towards the Buzz Score. Stories with the highest Buzz Score are shown in descending order on the Yahoo! Buzz homepage.

The most attractive thing about Yahoo! Buzz is that the stories with the highest Buzz Scores may be published on the Yahoo! homepage, which can drive millions of visitors to the site in just one day.

Popular stories from each day will be encapsulated on the Buzz Log, the same way that the Buzz Index has been doing for popular search trends on Yahoo! since October 2005.

Yahoo! Buzz is very similar to many other social content websites, e.g. del.icio.us, Digg, Propeller, Reddit, StumbleUpon and last week’s latest arrival, BigNews from Ask.com.

According to Yahoo!, Buzz is unique because their rankings also take into account things like trends in search queries on Yahoo! Search and the number of times that content is shared with friends over email. Internet users are not as likely to be impressed with Yahoo!’s latest offering.

Various generic and niche social news sites already rule this space. Digg receives an estimated 12.5 million monthly users, compared to Propeller, launched by AOL last year, which receives less than 3 million users. Yahoo! Buzz will need to fight hard to wrestle traffic away from these sites, and while publishers might be keen to join, with the hopes of making it to the Yahoo! homepage, users will not be as keen to leave their established favourite social news sites.

The screenshot above illustrates that Yahoo! Buzz is not seeing huge volumes on its first day. While the Buzz Scores of the top stories are in the hundreds, closer inspection reveals that the actual number of votes is much, much lower (read the number of votes below the highlighted “buzz up” button). This could change, of course if the service is properly marketed and diligently promoted for a long time.

We have a couple more screenshots from the system below:

Error message that shows up when you try to Buzz a story that isn’t integrated into the Buzz system.

Related top stories are suggested when you Buzz! up a story.

http://news.ask.com/news

Stories on BigNews will be graded by a ‘BigFactor’, which is based on various indicators such as how recently the event occurred, availability of photographs, the impact created by it, the number of links generated, etc. Unlike Digg though, viewer’s votes will not be allowed to directly affect the story’s rankings.

BigNews will provide top stories to Digg. In return, the top 5 Digg stories and 5 Digg articles that have not garnered any votes yet will be featured at the bottom of the BigNews page. A Blogviews section placed on the right, alongside the main stories, will highlight the latest posts and topics being discussed from popular sites like TechCrunch, CNN, USA Today and The Hollywood Gossip.

Every story on BigNews will include a BigFactor counter and a “Track” button on the upper right hand corner. Passing the mouse over the counter reveals information about the various factors contributing to the score. Clicking on the “Track” button opens a drop down list of popular news aggregators where the story can be followed, including Google, Yahoo! and even regular RSS. The story snippet also cites sources from which the story has been collected.

Ask have implemented this new sub-domain keeping in mind the true spirit of Universal Search. On the homepage visitors can view top news stories, blogs, videos, images and even Digg stories. In contrast, most of the other news aggregator sites stick to one or two result formats, usually text and images.

According to Ask.com, BigNews is a site for people who like to see different viewpoints to their story. For starters BigNews is reported to have more than 10,000 sources. Prominent among them are, The New York Times, USA Today, Fox News and MSNBC. BigNews has not yet released details on how other publishers can get add their news content. It is expected that such features will be made available shortly.

Search Engine Predictions

1. Google will continue to grow and play even tougher
2. Yahoo! will become the next AOL, suffer more layoffs, shut down more divisions but still stay independent
3. Microsoft will try rebranding and reorganizing its online brands again (to no avail)
4. Ask and AOL will continue being insignificant and border on the brink of becoming obsolete

Startup Predictions

1. Web services platforms will become the next battleground
2. Zoho, ThinkFree, Tumblr, Twitter and Digg will be acquired by larger companies
3. $27 billion of venture capital will be invested in startups and Mergers and Acquisitions will increase in volume but not as much in value
4. Consumer adoption of web office applications will grow

Advertising Predictions

1. Google AdWords will continue to grow and dominate the advertising market
2. Gadget Ads will present the area of greatest growth
3. Content networks will evolve and platforms will produce their own content (e.g. Google Knol)

Mobile Predictions

1. Mobile will finally happen!
2. Mobile web usage will grow
3. A second generation iPhone will be released to combat Google Phones (devices based on Android)

Social Media

1. Facebook will grow, but with a lot of bumps along the way
2. Privacy will become a greater concern
3. YouTube will announce HD video, ushering an era of ubiquity of online video
4. Facebook will forge independent deals with startups, making Google sweat!

Digg Images

To keep in tandem with this new section, the category system of Digg has also been reconfigured. Now users can submit images, video and news into any category. However, it would be better to get back the subcategories bar instead of the click-drop-down-menu that we get to see now.

The new image section does look cool but the absence of an accompanying description might become an irritation in the future when users get misled by sensationalist headlines and taglines. Alternatively Digg could expand the image or pop up an overlay of the image when a visitor hovers over the thumbnail images. At the end of the day, though, a picture still remains worth a thousand words!

Digg the Blog, the official weblog of the highly popular social news sharing site announced the launch of their new homepage design this week. The redesigned includes the return of videos to the forefront, streamlined navigation, one-click burial of unpopular content and more customization.

The digg team also hint at the arrival of newer content such as images, which will have its own section on the site, alongside news, videos and podcasts. Digg Images is supposed to go live in October, followed by an improved comments system.

Returning videos to the digg homepage indicates the growing popularity of the usage of online video on all types of websites, above and beyond just the dedicated video sharing sites such as YouTube and DailyMotion.