Who hasn't heard of Digg? Okay, you probably have not, but you will probably not stay in Social Media Marketing (SMM) for one day without a mention of Digg. Unlike Delicious, Digg is significantly different. And though some people lump them together as social sites, news submission sites and social bookmarking sites are as different as motorcycles and trailers. Both are indeed motorized vehicles but quite different in function and capability.
The internet avails to you a ton of new information daily. This makes it impossible to go through all information you may want to see. But even more importantly, it makes it easy to miss information you need to see. News Submission Sites are designed as voting systems that allow users to vote up new information they like and vote down what they donot like. As such you get the most popular information of the day in one neat page on a particular topic. It literally works wonders in separating "need to know information" from the "nice to know" kind (Ofcourse this has its limits considering we are depending on collective intelligence)
Though many consider Digg as the pioneer of social voting style of ranking content, the idea is likely to have been hatched by Kuro5hin as early as 1999 according to Wikipedia. Today there are a couple of hundred digg-style site with many concentrating on new information in niche topics. For example PlugIM and Sphinn concentrate particularly on search and internet marketing. Digg was previously for technology news but has since added other topics like health, environment, offbeat news and science. However it is still predominantly tech.
News sites depend on users to vote up a webpage based on what they find important. So a page that is popular has been deemed so by a majority of users. And just like book-marking sites, very popular content is displayed prominently on the homepage for all to see. However unlike social bookmarks, the huge traffic form these sites do not seem to be monetizable. As the name implies, these visitors are looking for new information (news). They are rarely looking to buy. So the traffic will hardly ever make you any money even from advertising as they consist of fairly sophisticated internet users.
As a web business you should not target news sites for direct traffic as you would with bookmarking sites. However there is an overriding advantage of using news sites for internet marketing and that is backlinks. A site that gets popular in these kinds of sites ends up attracting hundreds and in not too few cases a couple of thousands of backlinks in a matter of days.
This is because news sites are heavily used by bloggers that are looking for fresh new content to blog about. So they tend to link to their source nearly with no exception. This in turn improves the Page Rank (PR) of the site that is being linked to.
A higher PR on the other hand improves the trust of the sites with the Search Engines (SE). They in turn reward the site by improving the Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) of the sites web-pages. Higher SERP translate to higher traffic from SE, and this traffic is usually very monetizable.
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