How does the front page of Google News compare to the front page of Digg in terms of traffic?
Finally! I’ve always wondered the answer to this question, but I’ve never been able to answer it because the sites that typically make the front page of Google News don’t normally openly display their traffic statistics.
Well, when I saw that Andrew Sullivan’s blog got linked on the front page of Google News today, I knew that I finally had what I wanted. Sullivan uses Site Meter to gauge his traffic, which is about as transparent as you can get.
Now look at the traffic he received the hour his blog made it to the front page and compare it to the hour before:
Very interesting. It looks as if Google News drove about 20,000 uniques in the span of a single hour! Wow. I think Digg might be able to drive this much every now and then, but based on my own experience with Digg, you usually can’t count on much more than 10,000 hits in an hour. And as for other news aggregators similar to Google News — Techmeme, Memorandum — they don’t even come close.
