Social news community Mixx is seeing healthy growth ever since they left stealth mode. They got a nice traffic spike last May after CNN integrated ‘Mixx it’ buttons in their articles, roughly doubling their number of unique monthly visitors to nearly 1 million, and it appears their new community building features aren’t hurting them either.
A screenshot from their Google Analytics account shows that the Digg-competitor is gaining traction, receiving over 5.8 million unique visitors last month. Compete (as usual) estimates lower numbers but shows a similar growth pattern, as does Google Trends. Quantcast seems to affirm the number of reported visitors as well.
So how does that compare to Digg?
While we don’t have any insight on their internal stats, we do know Comscore, Compete, Quantcast and Google Trends all show that Digg yields much more traffic than Mixx, even if growth appears to be stagnating while Mixx’s is soaring.
Mixx is also very eager to show that their user base is more diverse than Digg’s audience, citing a Hitwise report that suggests its users tend to be more female (49% vs. 33%), older (36% in the 18-24 age group vs. 45%) and wealthier (e.g. 19% makes more than $150k per year vs. 4%) than Digg users. But comScore’s U.S. demographics of both sites tells a different story. According to comScore, females make up 47% of the Mixx audience vs. 46.4% for Digg. So about the same. But when it comes to 18-24-year-olds comScore thinks Mixx skews younger, with 17% vs. only 14% for Digg. And for households earning more than $100,000, Digg wins there as well with 30% vs. 27% for Mixx.
So whose numbers are you going to believe? It’s important to note that the Hitwise report was based on a 4-week study, which is in my opinion far from enough data to jump to any conclusions about the difference in user demographics. When you take the comScore data into account, the demographic differences seem pretty minor. Certainly they are not big enough to make any solid statements about Mixx being more mainstream than Digg.
Still a nice traffic growth pattern for a website that’s only been live for about a year and raised only $3.5 million in funding so far (Digg, for reference, has raised $40 million to date). Below are some comScore charts for the U.S.
Comments
Excellent growth due to the Cnn love. i remember signing in a long time back, but did not cash enough on the little traffic i got and hence opted out.
A million visitors is quite a large number.
Whats with the stats? female or old?? I am just looking at humans interested in my article. how does it make any difference???
I trust google trends — they usually get it right
Interesting that more of their traffic is from India than the US, according to Google Trends.
I like mixx.com - the site is nice from the visual perspective and also the content is not bad. I can see why they have such a good trend.
I’ve got 2 million visitors, with 57 million pageviews, per year. Where’s my million dollar valuation?
Just strike a deal with John Deere to advertise on your site. You would be easily worth $1m in the US with such a well defined demographic, not sure about NL.
Until Mixx creates a centralized page that is accessible (forced upon) all users…you will not see the kind of traffic driving power that Digg can deliver. Until this happens most users, bloggers and marketers will proceed with caution…and have a one foot in one foot out philosophy. The tech and functionality of the site are there. Wish more people would use it.
I have to agree with Stuart. However Mixx prides themselves on the Your Mixx page. It actually being a blend of your interests. At SXSW Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson actually held an interview while walking down the street saying they we thinking about doing the same with Digg. Making a users landing page customizable that is. Here is where I agree with Stuart, where Mixx thinks that Your Mixx should be the landing page, I disagree with them. You may have different interests than I do, so I do think the “Your Mixx” page is important but, how would I see the something else outside my realm of thought that might interest me? People discover and learn new and cool things everyday. So making the Popular page on Mixx be the landing page would be a good idea. You can still check “Your Mixx” for your own relevant interests, but it does not lead you to new discoveries. I for one am I die hard Mixx user. I have found myself visiting my your Mixx page less and less and the Popular page more and more. Besides the Popular page is where POPurls grabs their Mixx feed from.
And yes I have a ton of typos in that comment.
StuartFoster — most people who visit Digg do it without a Digg account. you can see this by reading up on their numbers. They get like 20 million people but only have 3 million accounts. i bet Mixx sees the same thing and so if you go to mixx without being signed in, those people do see the Front Page. they dont’ see the Mixx page
I use Digg because it drives traffic to my blog. Its plain and simple. I don’t know anyone who uses Digg for any other reason. its a giant game and makes me laugh when someone says they want to buy it for 100million dollars.
Funny that “they say they have a more diverse audience.” That’s not a good thing, an advertiser wants a highly targeted audience, not a diverse one.
Mixx supports (Yahoo!) OpenID…it’s easier to log into (I don’t need to remember my Digg username and password): sold!
Agreed, OpenID makes it much easier to register and login on Mixx. You can use an existing AOL, Yahoo, Facebook or one of several OpenID providers including Google, Flicker, Live Journal, MyOpenID, Wordpress, etc. You can see a summary of Mixx’s decision to implement OpenID at http://www.janrain.com/openid/casestudy-mixx
For anyone who doesn’t already have OpenID on their site, there is a free service from JanRain called RPX Basic at http://rpxnow.com
I think a much nice comparison is with reddit, according to google trends the 2 are almost even!
mixx who?
I would love to compare the numbers with Yahoo! Buzz.
Hockey stick growth right here!
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I think the only reason mixx is growing is the integration with other sites such as facebook and cnn. not due to its main website visitor growth
I may try it out. After all I am small fish on here. I am lucky if anything I dig gets beyond a count of one.
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