Which sites do the Top Diggers Read?
How do you influence the influencers?
I’ve become slightly obsessed with figuring out Digg. I’m fairly confident that the top Diggers represent the key to understanding Digg, so I scraped the most recent 150 submitted stories from the top 100 Diggers (just under 15,000 stories) with the goal of finding out what they read.
A few observations:
- Although the list largely consisted of several tech-centric sites, there were a few surprises on the list - several domains that I’d never heard of before
- Many Top Diggers have a pretty narrow reading list. However, there are those that are pretty adventurous - I’ll put together a separate post about the those diggers
- Several sites have benefited tremendously from “Patron Diggers” - one or two diggers that religiously reads and submits from the site (in some cases they may be site owners, employees, etc.) See this post on nwfdailynews.com and GiantAppleCore.
The first output from my research is the top 50 domains that Top Diggers are reading. I’ve highlighted the domains where a single Digger accounted for an inordinate share of Diggs.
| # | Domain | Total Submits from Top 100 Diggers | #Unique Diggers | Patron Digger (#Submits) |
| 1 | youtube.com | 514 | 73 | Foenetik(105) |
| 2 | news.com.com | 358 | 57 | |
| 3 | news.yahoo.com | 298 | 56 | |
| 4 | nytimes.com | 249 | 49 | Parislemon (72) |
| 5 | news.bbc.co.uk | 210 | 53 | iFelix (71) |
| 6 | today.reuters.com | 179 | 44 | |
| 7 | thinkprogress.org | 175 | 11 | jlegum (119) |
| 8 | physorg.com | 166 | 28 | |
| 9 | livescience.com | 157 | 16 | starexplorer (104) |
| 10 | arstechnica.com | 154 | 35 | |
| 11 | nwfdailynews.com | 147 | 1 | giantAppleCore(147) |
| 12 | washingtonpost.com | 142 | 35 | |
| 13 | engadget.com | 119 | 41 | |
| 14 | breitbart.com | 117 | 10 | elebrio (87) |
| 15 | abcnews.go.com | 114 | 33 | |
| 16 | cnn.com | 105 | 33 | |
| 17 | wired.com | 102 | 40 | |
| 18 | video.google.com | 92 | 37 | |
| 19 | gearlive.com | 91 | 2 | andru (90) |
| 20 | theinquirer.net | 91 | 26 | |
| 21 | businessweek.com | 89 | 29 | |
| 22 | gizmodo.com | 86 | 26 | |
| 23 | msnbc.msn.com | 85 | 45 | |
| 24 | forbes.com | 79 | 34 | |
| 25 | linuxdevices.com | 79 | 7 | deviceguru (50) |
| 26 | howtoforge.com | 76 | 5 | hausmasta (72) |
| 27 | eweek.com | 71 | 23 | |
| 28 | money.cnn.com | 68 | 27 | |
| 29 | eurekalert.org | 66 | 11 | |
| 30 | lewrockwell.com | 66 | 2 | Rhiannon1214 (50) |
| 31 | betanews.com | 65 | 10 | |
| 32 | informationweek.com | 63 | 20 | |
| 33 | kotaku.com | 61 | 18 | |
| 34 | space.com | 60 | 10 | |
| 35 | usatoday.com | 56 | 31 | |
| 36 | joystiq.com | 55 | 18 | |
| 37 | theregister.co.uk | 54 | 21 | |
| 38 | sciencedaily.com | 53 | 12 | |
| 39 | sports.espn.go.com | 53 | 14 | |
| 40 | timesonline.co.uk | 53 | 31 | |
| 41 | latimes.com | 52 | 21 | |
| 42 | tgdaily.com | 51 | 11 | Bleek-II (30) |
| 43 | newscientist.com | 50 | 19 | |
| 44 | news.zdnet.com | 48 | 16 | |
| 45 | mediamatters.org | 47 | 6 | snipehack (38) |
| 46 | time.com | 47 | 25 | |
| 47 | blogs.zdnet.com | 46 | 20 | |
| 48 | dailytech.com | 45 | 16 | Bleek-II (20) |
| 49 | guardian.co.uk | 45 | 27 | |
| 50 | sfgate.com | 45 | 22 | Tomboy501 (16) |
nwfdailynews.com is the Northwest Florida News. Go figure.
Update
I’ve uploaded the source data I used for the analysis. Use that file to answer questions and comments along the lines of “You forgot ‘insert favorite site here’. I see that site on Digg all the time”. You’ll feel better knowing that I didn’t forget it - this was a study of the top diggers, not a study of all the sites submitted to Digg.
