Yahoo Buzz! sending publishers into a traffic frenzy

Buzz, Yahoo’s three week-old social news site and “meme tracker” is proving to be a major blessing for publishers who are featured on the homepage, sending traffic in numbers that rival the Digg-effect. Perhaps unsurprising considering that some of the most "buzzed" stories are also given screen real-estate on Yahoo.com.

Yahoo tells ReadWriteWeb that Yahoo.com has sent approximately 16 million total referrals to just a subset of the publishers allowed into the beta during the first two weeks. Others stats handed over to RWW include:

• Salon.com reached over 1 million uniques in one day for the first time in the company's 12-year history, after Yahoo.com linked to one of their highly "buzzed" stories.
• When Yahoo.com linked to one of their stories, The Smoking Gun received approximately 1 million additional page views over their average traffic, with over 275,000 visitors coming from the Yahoo! homepage.
• Portfolio.com (part of Conde Net) received over half a million referral visits from a Yahoo.com “Buzzing Now” link.
• HuffingtonPost received over 800,000 unique visitors from Yahoo.com in one day.
• Dallas Morning News’ traffic spiked as a result of their Yahoo.com “Buzzing Now” link, making the featured story their most viewed single story on dallasnews.com that day.
• maginova: Space.com and LiveScience.com articles were featured and linked to directly from Yahoo!'s homepage and both sites saw significant increases in daily visitors and traffic after being featured for just 2 hours.

TechCrunch has more stats and direct experience of being featured on Buzz:

Yesterday we were linked from the Yahoo home page as well... The link went live at 5:45 PM PST as one of the bottom four links in the news box (these send less traffic) and was up through the day. Despite the fact that yesterday was a Saturday (slowest traffic day of the week) and that it was up only 1/4 of the day, we had our highest traffic day ever and over 1,000 comments were left on the post. The traffic almost brought our site down...

OK, so Buzz (for those publishers lucky enough to be included) can send a lot of traffic. However, as serial social bookmarker, Muhammad Saleem* points out, Yahoo referalls like to leave a lot of comments (whereas Diggers tend to comment over at Digg more than the source site). I bet the quality of discussion via Yahoo readers is higher too.

* Muhammad: you weren't the only one to be positive on Buzz when it first launched!