Frank Barnako at MarketWatch writes that the numbers for Digg.com, a news aggregator where articles are listed according to how many votes they receive from readers, shows that it "isn't the New York Times." Well, there's no doubt about that. But Digg is spearing those coveted young readers, which definitely has implications for the future of news.

According to senior analyst at Hitwise, LeeAnn Prescott, Digg is the "101st most popular news and media Web site in the US" with 0.13% of the total of visits to these sites. Taking into consideration the whole picture, that's not all that bad.

Digg launched in December 2004; that means it has existed for a year and a half. The New York Times first published on the Web in 1995. YahooNews, the American Web's most popular news site, has only been around since 2002.

Furthermore, until two weeks ago, Digg was just a technology news site. It has just added science, world & business, videos, entertainment and gaming categories that are all in beta. YahooNews (essentially an advertisement for the AP which dropped the ball on being its own news aggregator, but that's another story), has aggregated all news since its inception.

If Digg can become the 101st most popular news site just being a technology site, now that it's expanding, what is there to stop it from jumping up in the rankings? And more importantly, what about young readers?

26% of Digg's users are between the ages of 18-24 and only 10% are over 55, the same demographic which comprises 35% of nytimes.com readership. Doesn't this say something, not only about the way that young people are reading the news online, but how they will continue to read the news throughout their lifetimes? Now that Digg has expanded into other categories, especially entertainment on which this demographic thrives, isn't the site's popularity sure to increase?

According to one person quoted by Barnako, Digg is just a "flavor of the month" and that the NYT will continue "attracting massive audiences to very hard to duplicate content - for a long, long time." Fair enough. But until now, the only section of the New York Times ranked on Digg was its technology section. Now that the entire paper is pretty much fair game for the socially edited news aggregator, isn't more NYT traffic, especially from younger readers, bound to come through Digg?

In the end, it may all come down to the personal preferences of newsreaders: readers more comfortable with the decisions of a few, professional editors will still read their news through their favorite publication; those which prefer the collective opinion of their newsreading peers will start their news searches with sites like Digg.

Which would you choose? Because chances are, as the numbers show now, those younger readers you're trying to attract are going to be very attached to social editing.

Source: MarketWatch, previous posting about Digg and predicition of expanded "coverage"