Digg Link Sends More Traffic Than Drudge Link Says L.A. Times

Posted on February 11, 2007

An L.A. Times article says that Digg has topped the Drudge Report as the top driver of traffic to news stories. Here is the Alexa comparison between the two website. The L.A. Times story also gets into the recent issue where Digg delisted their top diggers.

Since the dawn of the Internet, one site has reigned over all others as the Web's official rounder-upper of the day's news: the Drudge Report. As anyone who works at a news website can tell you, the best driver of viewers to one of your stories is a link on Drudge. The second-best way is - there is no second-best way. For years, if a news story broke in the woods and Drudge didn't link to it, it didn't break.
Many, including such otherwise favored Web tycoons as Arianna Huffington and Gawker media's Nick Denton, have launched sites positioned as rivals to Drudge, but none has made a dent - until now. Welcome to Digg.com, the czar of social news - a kind of cross-pollination of Drudge and MySpace. The site's main function is fairly straightforward: Users post links on the Digg site to news stories. Other users look at the story and vote to either raise it up to the top of the site or bury it at the bottom.

The L.A. Times also jokes that the Drudge Report's algorithm remains intact: "As for the Drudge Report, its algorithm - Matt Drudge linking to whatever the heck he feels like - appears, at this hour, to be secure."

Digg may have removed its top diggers list but that hasn't kept them out of the spotlight. A Wall Street Journal article has listed top social media link submitters from Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, Delicious, Stumbleupon, and Netscape. The WSJ even found pictures of most of them which led to this clever title from the Guardian's technology blog: "So that's what dirtyfratboy looks like...." Jason Calacanis was glad to see some Netscape Navigators included.