by Head of Search
Andrew Girdwood
Yahoo Buzz was launched late in February 2008 as a social news and meme tracking site. Through Buzz, Yahoo works with hand selected publishers to feed stories to the community and then allows the community to vote for the stories which should make the headlines. Andrew Girdwood
The most popular stories may make it onto Yahoo's homepage - potentially a generator of formidable traffic - and, as a result, publishers are queuing up to be included by the site.
The fact that publishers need to have prior approval from Yahoo before their stories appear is the main differentiator between Yahoo Buzz and well-established social news sites like Digg and Reddit. To some, this aspect of Yahoo Buzz may lend it a strong degree of legitimacy, while others might see it as a site that takes away the variety and unpredictability that make social news sites like Digg so popular.
Nevertheless, comScore's Media Metrix has figures for Yahoo Buzz's performance in March, which reveal that the new site is already a strong competitor to Conde Nast's Reddit.com - an impressive achievement in its first two months of existence. According to the statistics, Digg clocked up 1, 617 000 visits in March, Reddit pulled in 54, 000 and Yahoo Buzz made 43, 000.
The demographic analysis of visitors reveals the true differences between Digg and Yahoo Buzz. Digg is largely a male dominated site with female visitors making up only a quarter of the audience. Yahoo Buzz, on the other hand, is roughly evenly split between male and female visitors.
Moreover, Yahoo Buzz does particularly well in engaging its visitors. The average amount of time spent on Yahoo Buzz per visit is much higher than that of either Reddit or Digg. Women spend the most time on Yahoo Buzz with an average visit length of 1.7 minutes. This is nearly six times longer than the 0.3 minutes men tend to spend on Reddit.
