Digg has now one less buyer to court. Today Yahoo! Buzz released some of the traffic numbers they’ve been sending out to selected publishers in the blogosphere — and the number are all time record highs.
Read Write Web says this is a game changer and that large portals like Yahoo! need not buy Digg’s technology because it can just easily make its own. One turn of the switch and millions upon millions of loyal Yahoo users will consume the added content.
Salon.com reached over 1 million uniques in one day for the first time in the company’s 12-year history, after Yahoo.com linked to one of their highly “buzzed” stories (they issued this press release) When Yahoo.com linked to one of their stories, The Smoking Gun received approximately 1 million additional page views over their average traffic, with over 275,000 visitors coming from the Yahoo! homepage. HuffingtonPost received over 800,000 unique visitors from Yahoo.com in one day.
Best thing is, these are mainstream users, unlike Digg’s traffic profile which are majority on the geeky side. The numbers are convincingly huge. Typical Dugg stories nowadays only bing around 20,000 visitors and 25,000 page views a day, and that’s on a good day (it used to be in the vicinity of 50k/70k).
Yahoo! Buzz is just a couple of weeks old and it’s already showing people it still has the muscle. Now, did someone said earlier the Digg copycat will never work?
Note: That now leaves either Microsoft, Google or NewsCorp. on the buyers list.
Obviously, Yahoo already had the traffic. It was a relatively simple matter of exploiting it. More proof that they don’t need to merge with Microsoft.