Mixx.com, the social news website supported by many big mainstream media brands, is in the news for releasing results that show its traffic has more than doubled in May. I was following the thread on this story this morning on Techmeme and thought I'd share some Hitwise data that may answer some of the questions being raised. Marshall Kilpatrick at Red Write Web suggests that while the growth is impressive he is surprised the site receives less than 5% of the traffic that goes to Digg. Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch points out that the growth in May came as a result of links from the bottom of all CNN.com stories.

Hitwise clickstream data provides some clues as to why the site's visitor numbers aren't higher. The site relies on Google for most of its traffic. Last week, 61.28% of Mixx.com's traffic came from a Search Engine, with Google alone accounting for 55.22% of US visits. The second highest provider of traffic last week was YouTube, accounting for 5.13% of site visits. News and Media websites accounted for 9.41% of site visits last week. As you'd expect CNN tops the list, accounting for 4.7% of visits last week. However, interestingly, social news competitor, Digg.com was the #2 News and Media site sending visits to Mixx.com.

For those wondering why Mixx is not bigger than it is - the answer lies in its clickstream. The site is ticking along growing traffic virally. It was not growing by the leaps and bounds many seemed to expect, because it just wasn't getting that much traffic from its mainstream media partners.

In May, things changed. At the beginning of May, CNN was sending too little traffic to Mixx.com for it to register with our 10 million strong sample of US Internet users. Things progressively increased until last week, Mixx.com received 0.021% of downstream visits from CNN.com, incidentally the same share that CNN sent to Digg.com. The following chart shows the weekly share of visits to Mixx.com on the left axis and downstream visits from CNN.com to Mixx.com.

If the trajectory from CNN continues and if Mixx is able to secure a similar lift from other media partners, the future will be very rosy for Mixx.

Heather Hopkins

Heather Hopkins is VP of Research for Hitwise UK. This piece was originally posted on Hitwise Analyst blog here.

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