Social Bookmarking Sites: Is their Popularity Dropping?
Two weeks ago, Darren from ProBlogger ran a poll about the most Popular Social Bookmarking Site. The most popular one was StumbleUpon (with 31%), and following were Del.icio.us with 21% and Digg with 19% (A little sidenote: All the three websites have a Google PR 8). Now let’s take a look at their Alexa Traffic Rank (for one year):
I must say this is one ugly JPG. A little higher quality might help you, Alexa
Let’s take a look at graph: both Digg and Delicious got a lower Alexa Rank than last year’s January, in fact, Delicious’ rank dropped heavily. But what about StumbleUpon? SU’s silently getting a better rank day by day. Let’s take a look at each site’s graph:
Digg.com: Alexa Rank #150
Digg’s rank has steadily dropped over the last year since its peak Alexa Rank #80. Impressive enough, one year later, Digg’s Alexa Rank is 150, almost 90% worse, and it doesn’t show any signs of coming back. Is Digg really less popular or is it a problem with Alexa? According to SEOmoz, on May 2007, Digg had been sending the lowest referral traffic to SEOmoz in 1.5 years. As I am a Digg user, their latest updates including a new voting system and the way Digg users used their friendship to make posts reach the frontpage may have affected them dearly. 150 is still a very impressive Alexa Rank, but what if the traffic keeps dropping?
Del.icio.us: Alexa Rank # 429
Del.icio.us shows quite a drop too. Its Alexa Rank was somewhere around 160 last year. One year later: Delicious’ Alexa Rank is now 450, 181% or almost three times lower than last year’s. I don’t use Delicious so frequently, and I haven’t heard about any drastic changes or community complains. Perhaps the lack of changes is what’s bringing Delicious down? I’m not sure, but if you know why this drop please let me know.
StumbleUpon: Alexa Rank # 311
Now let’s see StumbleUpon’s Alexa Traffic: the average traffic has increased slightly (not too relevant though), but the most important part is that it hasn’t dropped, as opposed to Digg or Delicious. Maybe StumbleUpon is silently going to become the number one Social Bookmarking site? (I’m also lead to believe that StumbleUpon’s traffic is lower since visitors can see new websites directly through the StumbleUpon bar.)
Conclusion
First of all, there’s always the possibility that Alexa’s measurements are misleading or simply wrong. Forgetting about that little fact, it’s possible that Social Bookmarking sites are becoming less popular, or maybe they were too popular last year. Either way, we’ll see some interesting results this year; maybe StumbleUpon will take over the market, maybe not. What do you think?
Technorati Tags: Alexa Rank, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, popularity, Alexa Traffic, WebSoda Analysis
Stumble it!
February 13th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
According to one of the internet marketing gurus (I think it was Armand Morin), one should take alexa ranking with a pinch of salt. My own alexa rank has sharply dropped, despite my traffic going steadily up. My conclusion is that alexa shows part of total market share, and that means comparing apples with oranges. A lot of people bookmark, but a lot of people also search, and now with faster broadband, sites like youtube are making the top places quite crowded, pushing other sites down the list, even if they are as popular as ever.
February 13th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Yes, indeed Alexa may be very misleading and I don’t exactly trust it. One thing for sure is that the higher the Alexa Rank, the more accurate (or at least less skewed) the data is.
The real problem is that, besides the webmaster’s own stats, there is little to no information about the number of visits. And the increasing pageviews to sites like Youtube as you said probably make a lot of difference
One thing I do firmly believe is that there are communities where Alexa is more common than others. For example, IMO the Alexa toolbar is most likely installed on a techie’s computer.
February 14th, 2008 at 12:58 am
[…] Social Bookmarking Sites: Is their Popularity Dropping? - This article from Web soda goes right along with Alexander van Elsa’s. […]
March 1st, 2008 at 10:04 am
I know I prefer SU.
March 23rd, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Take a look at http://www.entopica.com/, a new social bookmarking website
It is an online system that allows you to easily access, categorize, share and store your bookmarks online
Entopica offers a free registration and it is both quick and easy. Register now and discover a whole new world of social bookmarking
May 20th, 2008 at 5:10 am
A good man would prefer to be defeated than to defeat injustice by evil means.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Hi-ya, I was searching on the internet for a script that automatically could submit url’s to different social bookmarking websites. When reading some reviews i saw a piece of software called “Bookmarkwiz”. This guys salespage is bookmarkwiz. com (I think its not released yet) I think it looks really attractive. Manually submitting my sites to propeller and digg and others is taking days of my time and hire some freelancers it isnt really cheap aswell. Some automatic solution will solve my dilemmas. I’ve seen alot of visitors here talk about socialbookmarking.. what do you guys think? assumably some of you have any experience with tools like this? I think social bookmarking is a fast way to maximize backlinks and traffic…
November 30th, 2009 at 3:21 am
What I dont believe I see eye to eye with that at all honestly.
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March 8th, 2010 at 7:20 am
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May 24th, 2010 at 8:36 pm
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July 29th, 2010 at 11:24 am
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