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The Most Buried News Sites on Digg

July 23, 2009 by Adam Sherk

It’s no secret that mainstream news sites are experiencing increased exposure on social news sites like Digg. Back in March Soshable noted that 46% of the Digg front page is controlled by 50 websites.

Major news sites have seen strong increases in social media referral traffic over the past couple years, and Digg continues to be among the top referrers. But I was curious what kind of push back some of these sites might be experiencing from Digg users.

Using di66.net’s list of the top sources in Digg in the past 30 days, I pulled out 22 general news sites from the top 100 or so sources. Then using Digg’s advanced search I checked how many submissions from each domain had been buried.

CNN wins the prize for the most buried news site, with Yahoo News not too far behind:

SiteBuried
1cnn.com3064
2news.yahoo.com2723
3news.bbc.co.uk1580
4nytimes.com1500
5huffingtonpost.com1311
6msnbc.msn.com1220
7reuters.com1105
8foxnews.com889
9washingtonpost.com749
10abcnews.go.com611
11latimes.com423
12usatoday.com417
13guardian.co.uk403
14dailymail.co.uk387
15telegraph.co.uk373
16online.wsj.com289
17timesonline.co.uk260
18time.com258
19chicagotribune.com234
20independent.co.uk114
21upi.com105
22newsweek.com70

Of course some news sites have a lot more content submitted to Digg than others, so it stands to reason that sites with more submissions will have more buries. So I also looked up the total submissions for each, and ranked the news sites by percentage of submissions that were buried.

CNN and Yahoo News are still the most buried news sites by percentage of content, but ABC News and MSNBC are pretty close:

SiteBuriesTotal SubmittedPercentage
1cnn.com3064583605.25%
2news.yahoo.com2723546214.99%
3abcnews.go.com611124274.92%
4msnbc.msn.com1220251364.85%
5huffingtonpost.com1311311694.21%
6foxnews.com889241383.68%
7usatoday.com417142982.92%
8dailymail.co.uk387133132.91%
9upi.com10537152.83%
10washingtonpost.com749296092.53%
11news.bbc.co.uk1580647452.44%
12time.com258114942.24%
13timesonline.co.uk260118592.19%
14latimes.com423193882.18%
15reuters.com1105517842.13%
16chicagotribune.com234110672.11%
17guardian.co.uk403214211.88%
18independent.co.uk11461131.86%
19telegraph.co.uk373202671.84%
20nytimes.com1500861201.74%
21newsweek.com7040421.73%
22online.wsj.com289205901.40%

Going back to the di66.net list of top Digg sources, out of the 22 news sites I pulled out, CNN was the 10th most popular source and Yahoo News was 9th. So their bury rankings are probably higher than they should be. By contrast Telegraph.co.uk was the 2nd most popular source but it ranks 19th in bury percentage in this group. BBC News was the most popular source out of the 22; its bury percentage is right in the middle at #11.

It should also be noted that what’s most important is social news success is quality of content and user appeal, not to mention who the submitter is. But it does appear that some major news sites are more likely to be buried than others.

Related posts:

  1. Which News Sites Get the Most Social Media Engagement?
  2. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media
  3. News Sites on the New Digg: Who is Active, Who is Gaining Followers?
  4. NBC Targets Local Markets on the New Digg
  5. Publisher Survey: Reddit Traffic Way Up, Digg Way Down

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About Adam Sherk

Adam Sherk is an SEO and PR consultant helping publishers with digital strategy and audience development, including enterprise SEO, public relations and social media marketing.

Adam is VP SEO and Digital Strategy for Define Media Group.

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