It has been a year since I took at look at the followers and activity of News Sites on the New Digg so I thought I would see how those official profiles are faring today.
When I did my original post Digg v4 was just about to come out of alpha so there has been a significant increase in exposure for the profiles and many more publishers have created them.
However once Digg discontinued the ability to automatically submit content via RSS after negative feedback from users, activity on the official profiles dropped off considerably. So where do things stand today?
For comparative purposes I will stick to the 30 mainstream and business news profiles that were examined in my original post.
First a look at follower counts one year later:
| Profile | Followers 8/10/11 | Followers 8/4/10 | Increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time | 63,904 | 7,842 | 715% |
| The New York Times | 58,401 | 10,225 | 471% |
| Telegraph.co.uk | 58,396 | 5,621 | 939% |
| The Wall Street Journal | 52,031 | 9,546 | 445% |
| Huffington Post | 45,435 | 4,773 | 852% |
| The Daily Beast | 37,936 | 300 | 12545% |
| Breaking News | 31,272 | 1,695 | 1745% |
| BBC News | 25,601 | 9,222 | 178% |
| Yahoo! News | 24,219 | 1,212 | 1898% |
| CNNMoney | 19,297 | 1,024 | 1784% |
| CNN | 19,175 | 945 | 1929% |
| CBS News | 18,883 | 1,182 | 1498% |
| USA Today | 16,179 | 1,874 | 763% |
| MSNBC | 15,219 | 1,573 | 868% |
| United Press International | 11,444 | 0 | N/A |
| The Economist | 10,634 | 5 | 212580% |
| Forbes | 10,476 | 3,661 | 186% |
| The Washington Post | 9,287 | 1,941 | 378% |
| Slate Magazine | 8,445 | 1,537 | 449% |
| Bloomberg Businessweek | 8,094 | 1,085 | 646% |
| Los Angeles Times | 7,756 | 1,899 | 308% |
| AOL News | 6,880 | 739 | 831% |
| The Atlantic | 6,530 | 761 | 758% |
| Fox News - Business | 5,995 | 467 | 1184% |
| Reuters | 5,409 | 1,531 | 253% |
| NBC Nightly News | 4,442 | 237 | 1774% |
| Chicago Tribune | 1,937 | 3 | 64467% |
| NBC Meet the Press | 1,818 | 449 | 305% |
| Boston.com | 1,307 | 173 | 655% |
| The Christian Science Monitor | 884 | 66 | 1239% |
| TOTAL | 587,286 | 71,588 | 720% |
Not surprisingly the follower counts for all of the profiles are way up. The YoY increase for the collective group is 720% and quite a few profiles have much higher increases than that.
In terms of total following Time jumped from #4 in August 2010 to take the top stop from The New York Times today. The Daily Beast also had a large jump that puts it in the top 10.
How about user interaction and engagement? Most of the publishers continue to follow very few others:
| Profile | Following 8/10/11 | Following 8/4/10 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Time | 962 | 964 |
| 2 | Los Angeles Times | 95 | 95 |
| 3 | Telegraph.co.uk | 84 | 68 |
| 4 | Breaking News | 83 | 50 |
| 5 | Forbes | 61 | 52 |
| 6 | Bloomberg Businessweek | 52 | 51 |
| 7 | The Daily Beast | 51 | 0 |
| 8 | Yahoo! News | 44 | 24 |
| 9 | The Atlantic | 40 | 39 |
| 10 | Slate Magazine | 37 | 18 |
| 11 | CNNMoney | 34 | 34 |
| 12 | United Press International | 29 | 28 |
| 13 | AOL News | 26 | 0 |
| 14 | The Wall Street Journal | 17 | 15 |
| 15 | CBS News | 14 | 21 |
| 16 | The Washington Post | 13 | 6 |
| 17 | The Economist | 13 | 12 |
| 18 | Huffington Post | 8 | 8 |
| 19 | NBC Nightly News | 8 | 7 |
| 20 | The Christian Science Monitor | 8 | 0 |
| 21 | NBC Meet the Press | 7 | 6 |
| 22 | Boston.com | 7 | 7 |
| 23 | MSNBC | 6 | 6 |
| 24 | The New York Times | 1 | 4 |
| 25 | BBC News | 1 | 0 |
| 26 | USA Today | 0 | 0 |
| 27 | Reuters | 0 | 0 |
| 28 | CNN | 0 | 0 |
| 29 | Fox News - Business | 0 | 0 |
| 30 | Chicago Tribune | 0 | 0 |
Time stands out in this group but it is actually following two fewer profiles than last year so it does not appear to be a priority for them.
The number of diggs by each profile is up quite a bit but there has been little commenting activity:
| Profile | Diggs by Publisher 8/10/11 | Diggs by Publisher 8/4/10 | Increase | Comments by Publisher 8/10/11 | Comments by Publisher 8/4/10 |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Reuters | 38,256 | 5,740 | 566% | 1 | 1 |
| 2 | Bloomberg Businessweek | 27,138 | 5,913 | 359% | 0 | 0 |
| 3 | Forbes | 16,554 | 3,958 | 318% | 0 | 0 |
| 4 | Breaking News | 8,969 | 1,257 | 614% | 0 | 0 |
| 5 | Time | 8,546 | 6,289 | 36% | 29 | 29 |
| 6 | BBC News | 8,105 | 5,423 | 49% | 0 | 0 |
| 7 | The Christian Science Monitor | 6,996 | 1,405 | 398% | 2 | 0 |
| 8 | Boston.com | 6,181 | 972 | 536% | 0 | 0 |
| 9 | Los Angeles Times | 5,421 | 3,620 | 50% | 0 | 0 |
| 10 | United Press International | 5,145 | 2,437 | 111% | 0 | 0 |
| 11 | Fox News - Business | 4,965 | 675 | 636% | 0 | 0 |
| 12 | MSNBC | 4,177 | 2,465 | 69% | 0 | 0 |
| 13 | CNN | 3,811 | 863 | 342% | 0 | 0 |
| 14 | CBS News | 3,488 | 1,960 | 78% | 3 | 0 |
| 15 | CNNMoney | 3,353 | 756 | 344% | 1 | 1 |
| 16 | Telegraph.co.uk | 3,061 | 1,435 | 113% | 2 | 2 |
| 17 | NBC Nightly News | 2,935 | 933 | 215% | 0 | 0 |
| 18 | Huffington Post | 2,809 | 767 | 266% | 4 | 3 |
| 19 | The Daily Beast | 2,800 | 519 | 439% | 0 | 0 |
| 20 | Slate Magazine | 2,278 | 658 | 246% | 7 | 7 |
| 21 | USA Today | 2,154 | 591 | 264% | 0 | 0 |
| 22 | The Economist | 1,996 | 457 | 337% | 0 | 0 |
| 23 | Yahoo! News | 1,651 | 334 | 394% | 0 | 0 |
| 24 | The Washington Post | 1,298 | 670 | 94% | 0 | 0 |
| 25 | AOL News | 1,070 | 635 | 69% | 0 | 0 |
| 26 | The Atlantic | 1,063 | 497 | 114% | 0 | 0 |
| 27 | The Wall Street Journal | 435 | 281 | 55% | 1 | 1 |
| 28 | NBC Meet the Press | 316 | 68 | 365% | 0 | 0 |
| 29 | The New York Times | 131 | 65 | 102% | 1 | 1 |
| 30 | Chicago Tribune | 1 | 1 | 0% | 0 | 0 |
Reuters, Bloomberg Businessweek and Forbes have much higher digg counts than the other publishers. But a quick look at the diggs by the Reuter’s profile shows that it is mainly just digging its own content.
The same is true for Businessweek and Forbes as well as many of the publisher profiles. One exception is Breaking News which appears to be digging a variety of content.
I didn’t look at the submission counts for the profiles last year since it was very early days for many of them.
But here are the submission counts as of today:
| Profile | Submissions 8/10/11 | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Reuters | 28,805 |
| 2 | Bloomberg Businessweek | 19,567 |
| 3 | The Christian Science Monitor | 6,996 |
| 4 | Breaking News | 6,833 |
| 5 | United Press International | 5,203 |
| 6 | Fox News - Business | 5,097 |
| 7 | Boston.com | 4,942 |
| 8 | NBC Nightly News | 2,915 |
| 9 | CNN | 2,239 |
| 10 | BBC News | 2,164 |
| 11 | CNNMoney | 2,149 |
| 12 | The Daily Beast | 2,134 |
| 13 | Time | 2,071 |
| 14 | Telegraph.co.uk | 2,071 |
| 15 | USA Today | 1,472 |
| 16 | Slate Magazine | 1,440 |
| 17 | Huffington Post | 1,435 |
| 18 | Los Angeles Times | 1,402 |
| 19 | The Economist | 1,375 |
| 20 | Forbes | 1,372 |
| 21 | CBS News | 1,296 |
| 22 | Yahoo! News | 1,141 |
| 23 | MSNBC | 1,083 |
| 24 | NBC Meet the Press | 320 |
| 25 | The Washington Post | 318 |
| 26 | AOL News | 316 |
| 27 | The Atlantic | 235 |
| 28 | The Wall Street Journal | 128 |
| 29 | The New York Times | 53 |
| 30 | Chicago Tribune | 0 |
Reuters and Bloomberg Businessweek again lead the pack by a considerable margin, but this came from self-submission (which is no longer possible to automate via RSS) as opposed to active participation.
So what do you think? Have official publisher profiles already run their course or is there still a good opportunity for those that are willing to engage users through genuine participation?
Leave a Reply