ath1337

After you guys smashed my site (thanks diggers), I figured I would take a look to learn a little more about Digg’s sports community - namely, which sports they prefer and how they stack up against general web users. It was actually surprisingly easy to do.

First, to be as comprehensive as possible, I wanted to take multiple measurements of Digg interest in each sport area (baseball, basketball, tennis, soccer and football). To accomplish this, I looked at total pages on Digg using the sports name, total number of pages with the sports name in the title, total number of submissions in each section, and finally compared that to the total number of popular stories which included that sport.

Secondly, I needed to compare this to the general web community to really determine whether Digg users were disproportionately in favor of one sport or another. To do this, I compared page numbers on Digg to searches for each keyword on a monthly basis according to KeywordDiscovery.com. This would also help us deal with some of the incidental issues (for example, the crossover use of the word Football meaning American Football and what America calls soccer).

So, what do we find? First, we look at overall sports occurrence on the site both controlled and not controlled for search volume. (For all graphs, the bars in the foreground are uncontrolled, and those in the background are controlled. All numbers have been normalized, these are not histograms.)

It appears from this first graphical analysis that Tennis has a disproportiate following on Digg. While it by no measure has the largest following, when controlled for search volume, the users on Digg are interested in tennis more than the typical web user.

When we take a look at Digg patterns by the title of pages, we find similar results for Tennis, but a trend in favor of baseball begins to be revealed as well.

We can also compare by category submissions themselves. Once again, both Baseball and Tennis are disproportionately represented on Digg when compared to search volume.

However, there is one final important step that can be taken here to determine the sports in which the general Digg population have greatest interest. By looking at the percentage of stories made popular in each category, compared to the figures we have above, we can come up with a strong number.

Clearly, the advantage for going popular lies in Baseball, more than tripling the popular ratio of any other sport. So, while there is a submission bias in favor of tennis (and perhaps it stimulates more discussion, thus more pages). Baseball, on the other hand, appears to enjoy more general support among the community, leading to popular front pages.

1. ag communications Says:
   June 26th, 2008 at 2:10 pm

   [...] statistical look at Digg users’ sports preferences when compared against the web community at large.http://www.ath1337.net/digg-sports-analysis/AG Communications - Independent Web Consultant - Baltimore, MarylandIndependent Web Developer based [...]



2. digglit Says:
   August 9th, 2008 at 10:53 pm

   sport illustratedDigg Sports Analysis