News Sites on the New Digg: Who is Active, Who is Gaining Followers?

The new Digg has gotten a lot of attention for the opportunities it creates for publishers (see ReadWriteWeb and BlueGlass for details). First and foremost is the ability to create official profiles and automatically submit content, which publishers are hoping will turn Digg into a friendlier place for mainstream media. But how will users respond to the new format? Do they want to follow and interact with specific media sites? Or will publisher profiles end up full of self-submitted stories with only one digg (their own)?

Now that the alpha version has been going for a while (update: the new Digg v4 went live to everyone on August 25th) I thought I’d take a look at how news organizations are faring thus far. Using the new Find Profiles page (it is behind the login wall so I won’t link to it) I went through the World News and Business categories to look for major news sites.

Here is the reported data on 30 media profiles, ranked by number of followers (as of today):

	Profile	Followers	Following	Diggs by Publisher	Comments by Publisher
1	The New York Times	10,225	4	65	1
2	The Wall Street Journal	9,546	15	281	1
3	BBC News	9,222	0	5,423	0
4	Time	7,842	964	6,289	29
5	Telegraph.co.uk	5,621	68	1,435	2
6	Huffington Post	4,773	8	767	3
7	Forbes	3,661	52	3,958	0
8	The Washington Post	1,941	6	670	0
9	Los Angeles Times	1,899	95	3,620	0
10	USA Today	1,874	0	591	0
11	Breaking News	1,695	50	1,257	0
12	MSNBC	1,573	6	2,465	0
13	Slate Magazine	1,537	18	658	7
14	Reuters	1,531	0	5,740	1
15	Yahoo! News	1,212	24	334	0
16	CBS News	1,182	21	1,960	0
17	Bloomberg Businessweek	1,085	51	5,913	0
18	CNNMoney	1,024	34	756	1
19	CNN	945	0	863	0
20	The Atlantic	761	39	497	0
21	AOL News	739	0	635	0
22	Fox News - Business	467	0	675	0
23	NBC Meet the Press	449	6	68	0
24	The Daily Beast	300	0	519	0
25	NBC Nightly News	237	7	933	0
26	Boston.com	173	7	972	0
27	The Christian Science Monitor	66	0	1,405	0
28	The Economist	5	12	457	0
29	Chicago Tribune	3	0	1	0
30	United Press International	0	28	2,437	0

The New York Times has the most followers with The Wall Street Journal and BBC News close behind. Currently only seven of the 30 sites have crossed 2,000 followers but The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and USA Today are getting close.

You have to feel for The Economist, Chicago Tribune and United Press International down at the bottom of the pack. You’d think UPI could at least attract a follower or two from its own organization. 🙂 To be fair though there are quite a few other profiles in the World News category with few or no followers that did not make the table. (For example Phoenix New Times, WGNTV and Seattle Weekly all have 0 followers as of today).

Time appears to have the most active profile. They are following 964 people (far more than any of the others) and have dugg over 6,000 submissions. They also made 29 comments; that’s a very low number but most of the other sites have not made any.

I did not see a main profile for Fox News in the World News section but they do have a profile in the Business section (foxbusiness). In cross checking against the news sites in my posts on Twitter impact and Facebook Page valuation I also did not see Digg profiles for Newsweek, ABC News, AP, NPR, PBS, The Financial Times or The Guardian. I couldn’t find them through Digg’s internal search either; if I’ve missed one or there are other major news site profiles that you are aware of please let me know.

Some additional notes:

1) It is not clear yet how well using an RSS feed to automatically submit articles is working. In going through the various profiles I saw a lot of submissions with just one digg. It will be interesting to see if sites that auto-submit in volume will end up drowning out the select articles from their site each day that have a better chance of attracting diggs.

2) I did not include sites from the Technology category but several in that group have attracted decent followings including Engadget (24,011 followers), Gizmodo (17,546) Mashable (14,528), Wired (9,695) and Ars Technica (7,724). While it is not surprising that tech sites are doing well it is encouraging that some of the top mainstream news sites above fall within in the middle of this group.

3) Of the publisher profiles examined only CNN and USA Today had not yet been customized with logos and/or descriptive text. Compare the CNN profile to Time:

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4) Forbes has opted to create quite a few additional profiles covering various sections and topics, as shown in this partial list:

This may help to attract more followers overall since users will be able to drill down on the specific topics that they are interested in. But there is also a risk that Forbes will spread itself too thin and weaken the value of its main profile.

5) NBC is also taking a multi-profile approach to target specific markets, for example:

The market-specific logos all match so this appears to be a coordinated effort.

UPDATE:
I got more information on NBC Local’s efforts from their Social Media Editor: NBC Targets Local Markets on the New Digg

UPDATE – February 2011:
After six months of negative response from users, low engagement and abuse by spammers Digg has decided to discontinue RSS auto-submissions for publishers. According to Digg product manager Mike Cieri only 4.5% of all Top News content came from RSS submissions. See Mashable for the details: Digg Bans RSS Submissions.