Social Media Presence of the Technorati Top 20
Glen Allsopp / 
13 Comments / 
May 6th, 2008 / 
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If you have read this blog for any length of time you will know I’m a bit of a stats geek and love researching things in quite a bit of detail. This post is no different; I decided to check if there was any correlation between the amount of mentions on 3 big social media sites compared to where a site is placed on the Technorati Top 20.
Of course, all these blogs are big and well read, but does their social presence hold any indication as to why they are so popular? Let’s find out shall we:
Technorati Top 20
Huffington Post- Techcrunch
- Engadget
- Gizmodo
- BoingBoing
- Lifehacker
- ArsTechnica
- ICanHasCheezburger
- Mashable
- Daily Kos
- Read Write Web
- Smashing Magazine
- Seth Godin
- Google Blog
- Beppe Grillo
- Gigazine
- Dosh Dosh
- Problogger
- Perez Hilton
- Gawker
Presence on StumbleUpon
There doesn’t appear to be anything too out of the ordinary here, there is a downward curve in the graph which would suggest some form of popularity on StumbleUpon helps with Technorati rankings but it’s not totally consistent. If you take Problogger (18) out of the equation however, it becomes a lot clearer that there could be some relation.
This was measured with a unique Google query as StumbleUpon search isn’t very useful
Presence on Digg
Here is where we start to see some real results. Notice how the top 7 blogs on Technorati seem to have at least some Digg presence then it dies down as you get lower down the list. There are multiple reasons for this of course, Digg is very tech orientated which is the niche of some of the top blogs; there is also the case of Digg banning certain URL’s so they may not have had a chance to build up their mentions like the others.
Results / mentions also generated with a unique Google query
Presence on Delicious
Similar to the Digg chart, you can see that the top blogs have a much better presence in Delicious then the sites lower down the list. I’m surprised that this research showed such a difference in the mentions the top blogs have compared to the less popular (yet still highly traffic) ones according to Technorati. It’s interesting to note that Huffington Post visitors really don’t seem to tag the site a lot on Delicious; of course it really depends on the demographic of the visitors.
Figures taken from the number of Delicious search results
What Came First, the Blog or the Traffic?
To put that sub-heading into more detail, are the top blogs actually top blogs because of their presence in social sites? Or, do the bigger blogs have the more social presence because they have a bigger audience? In my opinion, there are two ways that argument can swing, and both have their merits.
To be honest, this little ‘test’, wasn’t as fair or accurate as it could have been, multiple reasons for that include:
- Readerbase differs - the tech blogs have a big presence on Digg because that was the sites original focus. Sites like Huffington Post don’t have such a strong delicious presence because their readers are very politics based and probably not interested in that type of services where as readers of Smashing Magazine love them.
- Site limitations - as mentioned briefly, Digg can easily limit the chances of a URL making the homepage of its site. Dosh Dosh for example writes a lot of Digg worthy content yet has never made the homepage, if it had a lot more people would submit the content to the site and it would have a stronger presence
- Communities differ - Delicious is a bookmarking service and of course, people tend to bookmark valuable content pieces they want to come back to and read multiple times. Techcrunch posts more than most blogs but it is very news related and people don’t tend to want to read the articles multiple times (most of them anyways).
The aim of this experiment wasn’t to reveal anything groundbreaking; as with all of my tests it was simply something I wanted to look into and then decided to share with you guys. As to what came first? Well, I honestly feel they are intertwined. Some sites were able to grow quickly due to traffic from the communities, others were able to leverage their existing userbase to help them pull even more traffic from the sites.
If you enjoyed this, I did say I was a bit of a stats geek and I’ve actually wrote some equally interesting content:
- Analysis: Top 100 Digg Users (Made the Digg Homepage)
- Analysis: StumbleUpon’s Top 50 Stumblers (Made the SU Buzz page)
- 10 Industry Blogs, 14 Days - Feedburner Stats
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This is a cool analysis indeed.
What I like is that one can see the difference between the various types of social media such as Digg.com and Del.icio.us
One of the differences you did not account for is that where the blog is located may matter if people use a certain tool such as StumbleUpon (e.g., Beppe Grillo - Italy) as we have also pointed out here:
http://commetrics.com/?p=45
There are not many users in Italy that use StumbleUpon, definitely not Beppe’s subscribers
Why the Google Blog fails to get more StumbleUpon referrals is a mystery to me.
Nevertheless, this is a great post, thanks.
You are right, I should have mentioned Beppe Grillo in one of the summary commentaries. Thanks for stopping by and leaving a great comment!
Nice post. Found it via StumbleUpon.
I’d like to point out that in the list, Gizmodo is linked to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
Good to hear, I see that someone submitted it. Thanks for the link check, fixed!
This is extremely interesting. Lifehacker is increasingly being mentioned by others more I see.
yeah lifehacker seems to have a large presence on two of the sites. Probably because their slightly tech focus and the fact the information is useful.
Mr. Analysis is back, glad to see it Glen! Would have liked to have also seen how Reddit factored in here as well, as it is usually touted more on the political audience (thus we should see a shift advantage to Huff Post). In any case, great enjoyable analysis - keep up the good work!
That was one of those comments where ive just thought, why the hell didn’t I think of that? Would have definitely seen a nice shift for Huffington Post.
Good thinking, definitely one for the future revisions.
Heh, that’s what I’m hear for, man. And look on the bright side: now you have a Part II post
You just know I’m going to have to do the whole 100
Brian says it best “Mr. Analysis” great article, love the information. So much to take away from this post…
Thanks Zak, your words are appreciated
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