Social Bookmarking Sites Love Blogs, After All

If you wander around Digg and other social bookmarking sites, you will notice a slight discrimination against blogs (or so it appears at first glance). Many blogging-related stories get buried automatically. The ones that make it to the front page often receive harsh comments along the “who cares about blogs anyway” fashion.

Those episodes made me curious, so I decided to dig a little deeper. The question that I wanted to answer was: how popular are blogs within social bookmarking sites? More specifically: what percentage of “popular” stories are coming from blogs? The results were surprising.

The Methodology

First of all I selected three social bookmarking sites to include on the research: Digg, Delicious and Stumble Upon. The next step was to actually define what would be considered a blog, and what would not.

In order to be considered a blog, the website needed to meet 2 out of the 3 criteria that follow:

• It runs on blogging-specific software
• It has a comment section
• Its content is structured chronologically

Obviously there were some gray areas. Some mainstream publications, for instance, are starting to adopt comments on their websites. They also structure the content chronologically, meaning that they could be considered blogs. But they were not.

That said, blogs of mainstream publications were considered as such. While anything coming from www.wired.com, was not considered, stories coming from blogs.wired.com were considered to be blogs.

The actual research consisted of monitoring the top stories (front page stories from Digg, popular stories from Delicious and “stumbled” pages from StumbleUpon) for 10 days. All the URLs of the counted stories were saved.

The number of stories counted each day is variable for the first two social bookmarking sites (since you can not control it) and fixed for StumbleUppon (since you can control how many pages you “stumble” daily). Below you will find the results.

Digg

Surprisingly enough (at least for me) Digg revealed itself to be the most blog-friendly social bookmarking site among the three. Throughout the 10 days, over 54% of the front page stories came from blogs.

This could be explained by the large number of popular blogs (e.g., Gizmodo, Engadget, Lifehacker and TechCrunch) that have a readership very active on Digg.

Alternatively, since Digg is the site that generates more traffic for featured stories, one could argue that bloggers “aim” for Digg when creating and promoting their content.

Day	Total Stories	Blogs	Non-Blogs	% of Blogs	% of Non-Blogs
1	44	17	27	38,6%	61,4%
2	47	21	26	44,7%	55,3%
3	52	32	20	61,5%	38,5%
4	54	36	18	66,7%	33,3%
5	45	21	24	46,7%	53,3%
6	43	28	15	65,1%	34,9%
7	44	24	20	54,5%	45,5%
8	43	26	17	60,5%	39,5%
9	48	23	25	47,9%	52,1%
10	42	22	20	52,4%	47,6%
Average	46,2	25	21,2	54,1%	45,9%

 

Delicious

Delicious was the most balanced site. Consider that 3 days out of 10 presented more stories coming from blogs. On average, 45,7% of the stories that appeared on the “Popular” page of the social bookmarking site were coming from blogs.

Again, even if this number is not as big as the Digg one, we can say that blogs represent a corner-stone for Delicious users.

Day	Total Stories	Blogs	Non-Blogs	% of Blogs	% of Non-Blogs
1	40	15	25	37,5%	62,5%
2	34	16	18	47,1%	52,9%
3	35	15	20	42,9%	57,1%
4	39	25	14	64,1%	35,9%
5	32	17	15	53,1%	46,9%
6	43	14	29	32,6%	67,4%
7	31	14	17	45,2%	54,8%
8	31	12	19	38,7%	61,3%
9	29	18	11	38,9%	61,1%
10	36	14	22	38,9%	61,1%
Average	35	16	19	45,7%	54,3%

 

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon had unexpected number as well, but in the opposite direction as those of Digg. There was no single day where the number of “stumbled” pages coming from blogs surpassed the the number non-blog ones.

On average, 32,7% of the served pages were coming from blogs. Maybe the results are biased due to the fact that they are coming from my personal stumble activity, and not from the Stumble Buzz page. I am working on the latter and will update the results shortly.

Day	Total Stories	Blogs	Non-Blogs	% of Blogs	% of Non-Blogs
1	30	10	20	33,3%	66,7%
2	30	9	21	30,0%	70,0%
3	30	11	19	36,7%	63,3%
4	30	6	24	20,0%	60,0%
5	30	8	22	26,7%	74,3%
6	30	8	22	26,7%	74,3%
7	30	12	18	40,0%	60,0%
8	30	11	19	36,7%	63,3%
9	30	13	17	43,3%	56,7%
10	30	10	20	33,3%	66,7%
Average	30	9,8	20,2	32,7%	67,3%

 

Final Considerations

Bear in mind that these results might deviate from the actual popularity of blogs within the mentioned social bookmarking sites (even because said popularity changes over the time). I am already working on extending the period of the research to 30 days in order to confirm the results.

On average, 54,1% of Digg‘s front page stories were coming from blogs, 45,7% of Delicious popular stories were coming from blogs and 32,7% of StumbleUpon stumbled pages were blogs.

Regardless of the peculiar characteristics of each social bookmarking site, the numbers were higher than what I was expecting. There are 15 million active blogs in the world, which is a fraction of the active “traditional” websites.

Perhaps there is a widespread misconception regarding the popularity of blogs. In this case, it seems that the facts trump opinions; blogs are more popular and credible than people think.