Netscape Userbase Woes (Insert Debbie Downer Noise)

I've been gathering user signup data on Netscape ever since it began. This is a very easy thing to do with the use of their handy Tracker. My goal was to show a trend, either positive or negative. I do believe that this is what would be considered a negative one:

Obviously, I do not think the main goal of Netscape is to get more users, but rather to have more participation. However, I would consider this information an indicator of waning interest. It is fairly difficult to compare this to Digg at the moment since there has not been any public statement of their userbase in a while. My guess is that it is fast approaching the magical 1 Million mark. Anyways, take this information for what its worth.

Edit: Muhammad gives some good positive analysis on the topic here.

Any other stats people are interested in seeing?

What Makes a Top Contributor?

I was over at Netscape today when I became intrigued by the "Top Contributor" box. Curious as to what makes one a "Top Contributor", I looked closer and came up with some surprising stats. Here is what I found:

Looking at the data it is quite easy to come to a conclusion about one thing; that there is a difference between submitters and contributers. In my mind a contributer would be someone that contributes to the community of Netscape, and not necessarily someone that submits many stories. As you can see above, some users submit a large number of stories but have terrible homepage ratios. With the same data it is possible to also recognize that the users with better homepage ratios tend to be the ones actively commenting on stories.

In my opinion, the users with higher homepage ratios seem to submit less stories, but obviously higher quality ones. The users with low homepage ratios probably submit anything that isn't already submitted hoping to get lucky. Of course I didn't research that, but I'd guess its pretty true.

I hope that is somewhat enlightening to someone.

Top 50 Dugg Stories of All-Time

A couple weeks ago (9/9/06), I was really bored and decided to look deeper into the Top 50 Most Dugg Stories on Digg. The raw data is on the following chart, my analysis is below it.

(Click image to view full size)

When I first started collecting the data, I figured that the top users would be responsible for the majority of these top posts. What I actually found was the complete opposite.

• Only three of the top 50 stories were submitted by the top 100 users. Two of those were by kevinrose.
• Average Digg Rank: 4780.58
• Only 2 users had multiple stories (2 each); kevinrose and dburka

I believe that this indicates the difference between the top users and this group of people. Perhaps top users generally find the day-to-day stuff that we all want to read about, while these contributers submit the things that are completely unexpected and awesome. What do you think?

For those of you wondering, the method I used to find these stories was to run a search for 'http://', sort by most diggs, set the timeframe to all-time, and I included buried stories.

On Digg/Netscape User Stats

(Click the image for better quality)

Netscape:
1st 12 hours: 985 new users (1970/day) (source)
1st 7 days: 3000 new users (428/day) (source)
1st 48 days: 34,000 new users (708/day) (source)
2nd 50 days: 26,255 new users (525/day) (source: netscape tracker on 9/20/2006)

Digg:
97 days since first stat I could find: 194,809 (2008.34/day)
32 days in between next two stats: 66,327 (2072.7/day)
Number Sources: ~250000 444809 511136

I decided to forget about analyzing the story count because of the lack of numbers to look at.