Yahoo Buzz is a Game Changer for Social Media; And Spells Trouble for Digg!

Yahoo Buzz is a social media experiment by Yahoo! that is currently in a closed beta. We found out today what kind of boost Buzz is giving the current selected blogs and news sources giving publishers huge bumps in both traffic and comments. Yahoo gave us the following data to back this up:
Early Publisher Results – Yahoo! Buzz Beta (Feb 27, 2008 – Mar 10, 2008):
· 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)
· US Magazine: In part due to a Yahoo.com link, February 27th was the second highest day in overall Usmagazine.com traffic since its launch in June 2006. Referral visits from the Yahoo! homepage accounted for 32% of total visits that day.
· 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.
· Portfolio.com (part of Conde Net) received over half a million referral visits from a Yahoo.com “Buzzing Now” link.
· HuffingtonPost received over 800,000 unique visitors from Yahoo.com in one day.
· Dallas Morning News’ traffic spiked as a result of their Yahoo.com “Buzzing Now” link, making the featured story their most viewed single story on dallasnews.com that day.
· Imaginova: Space.com and LiveScience.com articles were featured and linked to directly from Yahoo!'s homepage and both sites saw significant increases in daily visitors and traffic after being featured for just 2 hours.

While digg has been desperately trying to make itself into a mainstream social news site - and it has succeeded to a degree, as its front page now includes politics, entertainment and other non-tech stories - it hasn't got anywhere near the punch that Yahoo.com still packs. Simply put, Yahoo.com has the audience. And now it is implementing digg features.
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