Social Bookmarking Supercharges Traffic

Magazine Web site traffic (up 12 percent in Q1 according to the MPA) continues to be a bright spot in an otherwise rough year for publishers. Magazine sites are getting savvier about blogs, video and user-generated content (especially recipes).

In the last six months, however, the biggest traffic drivers here at Discover have been Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and a host of other social bookmarking or sharing sites.

A typically brief and unscientific survey of the big magazine sites reveals some interesting social bookmarking trends:

• The early movers (circa 2003-2006) still hold the top spots most places. Links to Digg, Reddit (now owned by CondeNet), del.icio.us, Facebook and StumbleUpon live in the top navigation bars at sites like SI, People, Wired, New Yorker, Reader's Digest and Esquire.

• Among new entrants, the Digg-like Yahoo! Buzz seems to have the most traction. Launched in late February, Yahoo! has been reaching out to traditional publishers, enticing them with the traffic firehose of the Yahoo! home page. The Buzz button now resides in the #1 spot on the article page templates of many Time, Hearst and Conde sites. Yahoo! claims to have delivered over 16 million page views to publishers in its first two weeks of operations.

• Almost everyone covers their bases by including a button from ShareThis or AddThis. Both services aggregate the literally dozens of other bookmarking sites, from IceRocket to Propeller to Simpy, making it easy for users to share your content. AddThis and ShareThis are both less than two years old and each has over 20 million users.

My take is that there is still tremendous growth here for publishers as Web users coalesce around half a dozen winners in this space. Managing your relationships with the bookmarkers (plus what site real estate you bet on whom) will determine how much of that growth you capture.

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By Henry Donahue -- Henry Donahue is the CEO of Discover Media LLC, the publisher of Discover magazine and Discovermagazine.com. Donahue was formerly CFO of Primedia's Lifestyles Magazine Group, a 30-plus magazine division, which included Soap Opera, Crafts, Boating, Equine and History titles.

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