by Peter Vaughan, Copywriter

Both Yahoo Buzz and Digg allow users to submit news and vote on articles, with the most popular rising to the top. But according to a recent study by comScore, Yahoo’s user-generated news site, Yahoo Buzz, is vastly outperforming the incumbent, Digg. Is this for real?

Well, the data doesn’t lie. During the month of April, Yahoo Buzz outperformed Digg with 7 Million unique visitors who spent an average of about 14 minutes on site. More importantly, 51% of Yahoo Buzz users are women, compared to Digg’s 39%.

While I’m a loyal Digg fan, I’ll be the first to admit that this is a long time coming. Digg’s site has long been criticized for being overly male, childish and, for lack of a better word, geeky. If you’re into video games, politics (if you count Ron Paul), gadget news and the occasional LOLcat image, Digg is the place for you. If you like sports, music, movies, celebrities and “reliable” news from “trusted” media, Yahoo Buzz might be your new home.

However, I wouldn’t raise the victory flag just yet. Digg’s fans are a special breed – they spend hours upon hours on the web, are very tech savvy, and obviously as the aforementioned criticisms state, stick to cult subject matters. To them, Yahoo represents an evil corporate machine (you need to register a yahoo email address to participate on Yahoo Buzz) – what Digg has going for it is anti-culture and mob rule, even in major site development decisions.

In recent town hall meetings conducted via web cam, Digg founder Kevin Rose listened quietly to hundreds of complaints about “super-user” scandals, poor commenting features and gaming (making an article popular via artificial, black hat means). However, the monthly public ranting sessions seem to work – Digg made its algorithm smarter by rewarding “experts,” blocking the ISPs of Public Relations companies, and updating its comment system two weeks ago.

More importantly, the statistics presented by comScore are a little misleading given the fact that the most popular Yahoo Buzz stories are featured on the search engine’s homepage. Each click on Yahoo is a click for Yahoo Buzz, greatly increasing the stats – this is a very intelligent business move, but doesn’t necessarily mean anyone is actually using and interacting with Yahoo Buzz.

Oh, and did I mention that right now Yahoo Buzz only allows people to post stories from partner and affiliate sites? This drastically reduces content options from bloggers and third-party sites. Once this ban is lifted, I imagine Yahoo Buzz will find itself with the same problem as Digg – dominant techies, or in the case of Yahoo, payola reps, gaining a monopoly on popular content.

In the end, there is no doubt a buzz blood bath will occur. Perhaps, Yahoo will ultimately gain the upper hand due to its mainstream dominance and a little bit of a budget increase from our friends at Microsoft. As a marketer, I recommend common sense – if your content is more techy go with Digg. If you’re more mainstream go with Yahoo Buzz. Or if you’re a real rebel, use both – it’ll take you all of fifteen minutes.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 11:16 am and is filed under Buzz Marketing, Marketing Trends. 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.