Nice additional information to complement my “Digg is an Oligarchy” post from a month ago. Based on data culled from the first Digg Townhall, the folks at CenterNetworks made a quick calculation.

On an average weekday, you have a 150 in 10,000 chance that your submission will hit the frontpage. However we need to remove a piece of your chance because we know that some sites (in Tech for example: Gizmodo, Engadget, NYT, Techcrunch, Lifehacker, Ars Technica) will get more than one a day on average. (…) I peg these special sites at 25% of the daily average which leaves the rest of us with the balance 112 out of 10,000 chance.

CenterNetworks posits that if things don’t improve, the average site or user might not continue to see a benefit in submitting something to Digg.com. Given that there are now two other valuable social news sites out there (Reddit and Mixx), it might be more appropriate to spend energy there instead. They do have a solution for Digg though: “create separate verticals which would allow 150 stories in each category to hit the frontpage of that vertical each day. ” i.e. increase real estate by “verticalizing” the site.

What it means: I totally agrees with CenterNetworks’ proposed solution. I believe the Web is continuing to become more and more vertical and successful “destination” sites that target everything/everyone risk being desintermediated by vertical sites doing a better job than them. We’re seeing the same phenomenon in social networks right now.