Equilibrium among the community-based news sites?
I was looking at some of the Alexa statistics comparing the Alexa traffic ranks for a number of the major community-based news sites over the past three years. The sites in question are Slashdot, Digg, Reddit and Netscape. Although I personally am mostly only familiar with Slashdot, I have heard a lot about the others.
One curious thing I noticed in the plot of the traffic rankings of those sites over time is that there has been relatively little change in their rankings over the past year. According to Alexa’s data, Digg had a fairly rapid increase in popularity starting at the end of 2004, until about May 2006. Reddit’s rise started towards the end of 2005, and seems to have stabilized somewhat since the end of 2006. Both Slashdot and Netscape have been on a slight downwards trend for some time now.
However, the data seems to suggest that some degree of equilibrium has been reached among the major community-based news sites. Relatively minor fluctuations aside, we may have reached the point where sites like Digg and Reddit may not see extensive growth for some time.