Ever wonder what kind of content is most popular on the various social bookmarking news sites? Well wonder no more…

We analysed over 500 front-page stories for Digg, Reddit, Propeller, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us to try and determine what type of content is generally popular on each site (Note: this is 500+ stories for each site not the total).

Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon and Propeller all seem to only include the popular stories in their feeds. Reddit may also include stories that get votes rapidly over a short period of time. The results are based on RSS feed data so some stories may have been buried after we included them.

For Digg, Reddit and Propeller we used the existing sub-categories on each of the sites for the graphs. For StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us we categorised the stories ourselves. (The category types can be seen above the Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon graphs)

We used the RSS function on Google Spreadsheets and manually copied the data into Excel spreadsheets every 3 hours or so. I’m sure people with programming knowledge can whip up a fancy application that does the grunt work for you, but we didn’t have any of those people at hand. If anyone has a better way to do this, please share it in the comments section.

We looked at the various sites on the same day, however, due to some sites updating their RSS feeds more regularly than others this wasn’t possible. Digg and Propeller have lots of front-page stories in a day while Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon update much slower (well, they do in Google Spreadsheets anyway).

It should be remembered that by analysing 500+ stories for each site that this is quite a small number in comparison to the number of stories that get promoted on these sites on a monthly basis.

While it’s still only a small number of stories that we analysed, it should still give a useful indication as to the type of content that is popular on the various sites. We’ll try to do this on a monthly basis and see if there is much difference to these figures over the coming months.

The following categories are what we based the Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon graphs on. It’s probably not the most scientific way to categorize the popular articles, but it should give you a general indication of the type of articles people like to read on each site.

REDDIT

DIGG

PROPELLER

Tutorials/ Resources - Tutorials, “how to” and resource guides etc..

Videos - Youtube, Metacafe etc..

Offbeat/Bizarre - Weird, crazy, bizarre, humorous stories etc..

Environment - Green issues, conservation, pollution, etc..

Technology - Technology, gadgets, cars, websites

Politics - Any political news or opinions

Business/ Make Money - How to make money online, business advice, freelancing, money saving tips etc…

Science -New scientific findings, space etc..

Lifestyle - Fashion, health, religion/atheism (you could argue that religion/atheism are better suited to another category, but we felt this was the best category for it to go in)

Arts - Music, photography, design etc..

News - Breaking news and other news items from places like BBC, CNN, newspapers etc..

DEL.ICIO.US

STUMPLEUPON

Source

Popularity: 11% [?]