Digg stats after Jason Calacanis offer
The Diggtrends website has just done some stats relating to Netscape owner's offer to buy out digg's top users. It'll be published tomorrow, but they gave me an advance look. [update: the diggtrends analysis is available now]
Diggtrends.com aimed to find out answers to the following questions:
- What is the real contribution of top 100 users?
- Who took Jason’s (Netscape) Offer?
- How did the user statistics changed after July 18th (Jason’s Offer)?
- How many dig users are really contributing?
To the first question, they found:
- top 10 users contributed 1792 of the frontpage stories - i.e 29.8%
- top 100 contributed 3324 stories i.e 55.28%
Nearly 30% of frontpage stories contributed by just 10 people is a pretty amazing stat - talk about the A-List!
Diggtrends.com also claims that "many [Digg users] have realized the value of being a top user and probably are aiming for Netscape money." Their reason for that claim is that many new digg users have surfaced since Calacanis made his offer and the number of submissions has increased dramatically. One poor digg user has submitted a total of 428 stories since 19 July, but none of them was promoted to the frontpage.
So how many digg users are really contributing? According to Diggtrends.com:
"As per Kevin, there are 444,809 registered users, out of these only 2287 contributed one or more story for the period of 6/19/2006 9:31:28 PM to 7/30/2006 4:41:34 PM, may be most of the users just digg & not submit any story, remember the 1% rule?"
The implication being that relatively few Digg users a) contribute at all; and b) even fewer regularly get onto the frontpage.
In a way, this doesn't surprise me. I've heard similar stats/trends from Wikipedia. Indeed at any community-driven site, there will be a core group of people who contribute. And amongst those, there will be an 'A List' who get favored treatment. Actually, it's no different to the blogging world. Or the Web in general.