The number of social bookmarking sites has exploded in the last year, leaving someone new the space probably a bit overwhelmed at where to start. If you are new to social networking understand that each social networking site is different, it attracts a different audience with different interests. Thus what interests someone on Reddit might not appeal to anyone on Digg.
So who are the main players in the social bookmaking space? And what is the profile of the typical user of these social bookmarking sites? The answers below might surprise you!
Digg.com
Digg is the most popular and notable of the social bookmarking sites. Quantcast estimates that that Digg has about 25 million unique visitors a month. The audience is predominantly male (65%), between 25-34 years of age, with a household income between 30k and 100k. Digg’s demographics have changed as it has become more popular (mainstream). Not to long ago the Digg profile was male, under 25 who made less than 30k a year. Social media topics that do well on Digg include interesting photos, anything anti-Microsoft and lists (top 10, etc).
Propeller.com
Propeller (formely Netscape) is comfortable the second biggest social bookmarking site behind Digg with over 5.8 million monthly uniques, of which 3.6 million (62%) are in the U.S. Netscape also attracts a male biased audience (54) , that is slightly older (45-54 is biggest age group), and 55% of Propeller.com visitors have an household income over $60k.
StumbleUpon
Stumbleupon.com reports over 4.5 million members and Quantcast classifies it as a top 5,000 site that has about 1.5 million unique visitors a month from the U.S. The audience is male biased (56%) and between the ages of 45-54 (22% of visitors). The older demographic also skews the household income with 51% of visitors having a household income of over $60k.
Reddit.com
Reddit is becoming a very popular social bookmarking site with about 1.2 million unique visitors in the U.S., making it slightly larger than Del.icio.us. Reddit attracts a predominantly male (57%) audience that is between the ages of 35-44 (25%). With 65% of the audience having a household income of between $30 and $100k, Reddit is a mainstream social networking site. As a result, political, environmental, business and entertainment news does well with this audience.
Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us is the oldest social bookmarking site and Quantcast classifies it as a top 5,000 site that gets about 1.1 million unique visitors a month from the U.S. The audience is male (53%) and about 47% of them are over 45. Similar to StumbleUpon, 51% of visitors having a household income of over $60k.
Newsvine.com
Newsvine is a top 10,000 site that reaches over 362K U.S. monthly uniques. The site attracts a slightly male slanted audience (54%) and 51% of the users have a household income under $60k.
Fark.com
Fark.com is a much more trafficked site than people expect. With 1,972,698 monthly unique visitors in the U.S., it is bigger than StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and Reddit. The Fark audience is heavily male (69%), between the ages of 25-34 and a household income under $60k (52%). The Fark audience likes interesting, bizarre and amusing news stories, along with regular photo manipulation contests.
Blinklist.com
Blinklist.com is a top 10,000 site that reaches over 353K U.S. monthly uniques. The site appeals to a more male group (59%) who are between the age of 25 and 54. About 54% of the audience earns over $60k a year.
Clipmarks.com
Clipmarks reaches over 205K U.S. monthly uniques. The site appeals to a male biased audience (58%) with a household income of $30-60k. The site attracts almost equal amounts of people between 25 and 54.
Shoutwire.com
This site reaches approximately 70,742 U.S. monthly uniques. The site appeals to a more male (60%), younger audience (38% are under 24).
So what does the demographic data tells us? One is that the typical social bookmarking site user is male, between the ages of 35-54 with a household income of $60k or more a year. Is this your target audience? If it is not, then these are probable not the main social networking sites that you should be focusing on.
Note that Digg attracts more users than all the other social bookmarking sites combined. Similar to how MySpace dominates the social networking space (and gets the lion share of advertising dollars), Digg is the dominate social bookmarking site. If you are trying to reach this audience, then you have to include Digg in your marketing efforts, simply because the audience is so large, relative to everyone else in this space.
Exactly what I need! Thanks alot.
These are great sites but nowadays I don’t visit Digg and Reddit as often as before. Probably because most of the users are not really that helpful enough.
Now I’m kinda hooked on Sphinn and SU…I really find it interesting and fun.
Thanks for the list. Currently stumbleupon brings me more traffic than any other social bookmarking sites.
Great info…
Great list. Thanks for the information. I still can’t figure out why Digg is the most popular as far as visits when Stumble Upon seems to be liked by so many more.
This is a good list and it’s really interesting to see the make up of each network. Not surprised to see StumbleUpon in third spot. I’m wondering if at some point we will see a mass exodus from Digg to StumbleUpon or another network ala MySpace -> Facebook. To me, StumbleUpon offers superior services to Digg and I sense others feel the same way (especially those new to social media). Only time will tell I suppose…
Great recommendations. I agree with @James Duthie that Stumbleupon will eventually pass Digg: it’s much easier to use and is more friendly to the new social media people. To me, Digg started as a techy trap and still is for the most part. Plus, it seems Digg is changing the way you can become Popular. I do like and use Digg but if I had to recommend one or the other, the “ThumbsUp” Toolbar seals the deal. We shall see what the future brings.
Thanks Buddy
Amazing List. Every day i use Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us, Propeller. Mostly i like to use Stumbleupon and Del.icio.us.
I would not have thought, that Clipmarks would be on this list.
I doubt blinklist on the list of top ten bookmarks, its just that you’ll need to put first their widget in order to be functional…
This is very interesting! I have enjoyed reading this very insightful post. Very engaging and informative. Thanks for sharing.
I’ve been looking for social bookmarking sites. I had a bunch of them but I didn’t really know which site will I choose for bookmarking interested websites, not until I was able to read this article. Thanks a lot for the writer of this article. I hope you’ll add 10 more
Digg is the best one…
Good list. Shoutwire gets me a decent number of hits in fact.
I love digg. I found a company who actually is hiring digg consultants to access their friend networks. Smart.
finally, i found the top list of social networking.
RatingOutOfTen.com ( http://www.roo10.com ) offers social bookmarking with the added ingredient of rating and profiling. This allows users to see who rated their bookmarks by demographic e.g. Did mainly boys or girls like it? Where were people that liked it distributed geographically. The site has only just gone public, and so is in the process of populating it’s database and growing it’s user base, but is open for visitors.
You can find a directory for social bookmarking sites at http://social-bookmarking-sites.com .
The sites can be filtered by the use of do-follow and nofollow, too. This should be useful for webmasters.
Great list. The stats are very helpful in determining which Social Media websites carry the greatest importance. Though I plan on submitting to them all.
Thanks for the list and a description of each. To be honest, I’ve heard of most, if not all, of these but didn’t necessarily know much about them except the biggies like Digg etc.
There’s an “art” to using them though isn’t there? It’d be great to see a write up of “best practices” for each. A lot to ask I know.
Cheers for the write up!
Thanks for the article on Social Bookmarking! Very informative… and timely! Keep them coming.
Good list of social bookmarking site list.
can you please add one more site of sb
which is http://www.spicybookmark.com
thanks.
Thanx a lot for the list
Thanks for the great list!
We have recently launched a social news site dedicated to wordpress titled WPscoop, you can check it out here http://wpscoop.com
All feedback is greatly welcomed.
Kledy.de http://www.kledy.de Nice Bookmarks
I would like to add http://www.earnersclub.net It’s a social content site focused on internet marketing, blogging and making money online.
There are about 300 social bookmarking sites around, but the top list did not change much.
Digg is the best one…
Thanks for the list and a description of each. To be honest, I’ve heard of most, if not all, of these but didn’t necessarily know much about them except the biggies like Digg etc.
Very informative. Do you think you will share some techniques to actually leveraging this various social media sites?
I have been using these sites for some time and I can definitely say that they have helped considerably. And now I have a couple more that I wasn’t using, but will now.
I prefer digg but unfortunately it seems that digg has been a target of spam (very heavily) and it is not as good as it used to be.
Really, above mentioned list are top priority Social Bookmarking Sites and that’s the backbone of Social Media Marketing.
Among all these list Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon are most useful as I have observed for my sites.