Posted on Sunday 29th of October 2006 at 10:55 in Apple

Apple is 20.4% of the Digg front page

NOTE - when referring to the Digg front page I am referring to the Technology front page

I've recently been pondering how Digg actually breaks down in terms of promoted submissions per topic, are there more Linux submissions than Apple or vice-versa? How can this pondering been turned into some metric to prove or dispel my passing thoughts? Is it true that Apple has the most responsive community? This experiment was born.

Why
I have more than a mild curiosity over what's popular to tech-savvy users as a majority, as I'm sure any "blogger" does but it does sometimes feel that I'm reading more and more on Steve Jobs than I am any other human being. It pays to be honest - my real motivation behind performing this experiment was to see whether I was going crazy or not, do Apple submissions perform better than others?

This experiment was established to confirm whether the Apple community on Digg is more responsive than the others, or whether I was just going crazy

How
As with all experiments it's important to establish a reasonable sample. In this case the experiment covered 11 pages of the Digg Technology front page (a sample of 162 submissions). Navigating through each page I recorded each submission's topic and how many Diggs it had received. These were entered into a spreadsheet and the following was observed :

Results
Straight and to the point; Industry News accounts for a staggering 42% of the Digg front page (although this was to be expected). What wasn't expected was the 20.4% dominance Apple has been holding, double that of the third most popular topic "Software". See the below graph for the results:



Overall there were 162 submissions on the 11 pages of the Digg front page that were analysed, with a massive 78,601 Diggs in total, giving an average front page submission a final 485.19 Diggs.

What can be gained from this?
Well, it's clear to see (from this sample) that there was an element of truth to feeling like Apple submissions are performing better than others; more than 1/5 submissions that reach the front page in the Apple category. "So what?" I hear someone say. Well, considering that at any one time there are around 50-60 upcoming stories in the Apple topic whereas Design has around 80-90: however Design only accounted for 7.4% of the front page. While this is unlikely to be an injustice it does suggest that the readers of the Apple category are more likely to Digg than those of others...

While Industry News does harbour the majority of the front page submissions, it also moves too quickly, so for most submissions to be picked up and it very much depends on the mood of the browsers at that specific moment in time. If you're looking to reach the front page it seems that Apple would be the best place to start due to more favourable front-page/upcoming story ratio and a seemingly more responsive readership.

This is going to be posted in Apple then?
This article will be placed in the Apple topic because not only does it discuss Apple more than any other but I dislike the fast-paced submissions that occur within the Industry News section. As an author I've never really written about Apple/Macs but this experiment has highlighted a key demographic that I have been overlooking, so consider this my first step into a wider world.

Further experiments
It would be interesting to see whether these metrics are consistent across the weeks and the months. If you think it's worthwhile to investigate this further leave a comment saying so, if there's enough support I'll dedicate more time towards trawling Digg for statistics.

 

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