Yahoo! Buzz Could be the Digg Killer?

Posted by Daniel Scocco

March 17, 2008

The social bookmarking scene is marked by the entrance of new players that aim to revolutionize the segment, but that at the same time fail to deliver on the most important factor: traffic.

That is why Digg is still considered the king of hill: no other social bookmarking or news aggregating tool can rival its traffic (StumbleUpon is getting closer, but with a different approach).

It looks like Yahoo! might finally be able to challenge Digg, though. TechCrunch recently published a post revealing the initial traffic details of Yahoo! Buzz. Salon.com reported over one million visitors to a story that was featured on the front page of Buzz. Confirming that number The Huffington Post claimed that they received around 800,000 visitors from the site as well.

That is a heck lot of traffic.

One point to note: Yahoo! Buzz is still in closed beta, and as a result only a selected number of popular websites are currently getting featured there (which could also mean a strong bias towards mainstream sites and blogs).

Another difference from other social bookmarking sites is that the algorithm that determines what stories get featured on the front page counts not only votes from the users, but also the popularity of related search terms and the number of times that the story has being emailed around.

Finally, I think that that the project has potential, but they will need to create a community around it, and to make the overall system somewhat democratic. Digg has its flaws, but it also has the most democratic core concept around: even a newly created blog could get on the front page if users were to consider its content worth.

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