Mixx, the social news site that competes directly with Digg, just celebrated its first birthday by announcing that traffic to its site has grown rapidly over the last few months and that it now attracts more than 4 million unique visitors a month.
These numbers are even more impressive if you consider that Mixx only had about 1 million unique in May.
This June, we criticized Mixx for apparently not being able to convert its partnerships with large sites like CNN, the New York Times, NPR, Slate, Reuters, and USAToday into real usage numbers.
Since then, Mixx has added a number of new features, including Mixx Communities, but most importantly, it seems the size of the Mixx community itself has reached a tipping point. In its anniversary blog post, Mixx diplomatically attributes its growth to all the “fabulous, intelligent and wonderful Mixxers,” but it is also clear that Mixx’s strategy of partnering with large content providers is finally starting to pay dividends for the company.
Our initial impression of Mixx was very positive and the new features the company has added since then have only solidified our opinion of Mixx as a very useful social news site for mainstream users.
At the same time, though, it is also worth pointing out that Digg now gets about 30 million unique visitors a month. Digg’s Kevin Rose has admitted, however, that the site needs to become more relevant to mainstream users if it wants to keep growing. As Mixx is already geared towards mainstream users, we think that is should be able to continue its rapid growth for the foreseeable future.
