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!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Websoda Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.