Brian Cray ··· Home > Blog > Social media > loses its holy grail loses its holy grail

When delicious redesigned its front page they hoped it would deliver "fresh" and more relevant front page links. While that's still under debate, one thing is for sure: The redesigned delicious home page has lost significant value to publishers.


The front page is the holy grail of social bookmarking and voting platforms

Like a front page story in the newspaper, social bookmarking and voting platforms such as Digg, Reddit, and Delicious reward big stories with a front page link. Publishers want to be on the front page. The resulting traffic is their payoff for referring readers to these services.

Before the delicious front page redesign a publisher was automatically promoted when they reached approximately 115 bookmarks; rewarding them with status, referrals, and many more delicious bookmarks. On average I received approximately 350 referrals and 80 additional bookmarks when I reached the Delicious front page.

But not anymore.

Delicious bookmarks don't mean shit to publishers anymore

To reach the delicious front page publishers need only 2 bookmarks… and tweets.

In other words you need to have content semi-worthy of bookmarking and more importantly, you need to be popular on Twitter. You don't need any more than 2 bookmarks on Delicious as long as you have the simultaneous tweets to back it up.

Delicious trivialized its own service.

Just use Twitter and you'll get the few bookmarks you need on Delicious as a result. Promoting Delicious bookmarking alone from your blog will no longer guarantee you Delicious front page.

So why promote delicious bookmarking at all!?

I ask publishers this question. Why promote delicious bookmarking when it's just another link on your crowded footer?

Furthermore the point of bookmarking is to save something for future use. From a positioning perspective for Delicious, what is the point of bookmarking when your positioning your service to provide breaking news links? Isn't that a positioning paradox? Uh oh, I just went cross-eyed.

Note: This article is written from a publisher's perspective and not from a bookmarker's perspective. If you look at it in the latter light, I'm afraid you will misunderstand the intention of this article.