Pligg are currently Seeking User Testimonials from users who run successful pligg sites for a new proposed homepage section of the official pligg site. Pligg’s owners say on their blog “We are redesigning our homepage and are in need of some great quotes from Pligg users to demonstrate how people are using Pligg and giving us some general praise. If you run a successful Pligg site, or work for a company that uses Pligg in some form, please leave a testimonial comment.”. This got us to thinking what established sites use pligg and what are their approximate traffic and user participation levels as of today.

It’s a difficult task indeed trying to judge just how popular a pligg site is, therefore we think it should be broken down into a few different categories, Traffic Flow and Member Participation.

For traffic we have used the data from Compete.com, Quantcast.com and Alexa.com, member participation was measured by looking at the sites Top User pages. Member’s with a submission number of 3 or less have been considered inactive. We know this method isn’t scientifically perfect and some users with only have a small number of submissions may vote upon articles regularly, unfortunatley we can only measure one factor. And to be honest 3 submissions isn’t a lot and we are being generous so the actual active user number for these sites may indeed be less.

With these in mind we went about building a better picture of the established pligg sites and what their approximate popularity is on the web.

Note: The listed sites are in no particular order.

IndianPad

Google PageRank: 5
Compete: 80’000 Per Month.
Quantcast: 86.5k
Alexa: 3605
del.icio.us saves: 212
Active Members: 310 pages x 30 members per page = 9300+ Active Members approx

Sphinn: Internet Marketing

Google PageRank: 6
Compete: 350’000 Per Month.
Quantcast: No Valid Quantcast rating
Alexa: 178,135
del.icio.us saves: 1069
Active Members: 28 pages x 50 members per page = 1400 Active Members approx

PlugIM: Internet Marketing

Google PageRank: 3
Compete: 34’000 Per Month.
Quantcast: No Valid Quantcast rating
Alexa: 93502
del.icio.us saves: 201
Active Members: 150 pages x 25 members per page = 3750 Active Members approx

It’s worth noting that PlugIM is the slowest pligg based site we have visited in recent times, rendering the site all but unusable.

Kirsty

Google PageRank: 6
Compete: 55,000 Per Month.
Quantcast: 39.0K
Alexa: 68654
del.icio.us saves: 233
Active Members: 135 pages x 25 members per page = 3375 Active Members approx

Design Float – Web Design News & Tips

Google PageRank: 5
Compete: 70’000 Per Month.
Quantcast: No Valid Quantcast rating
Alexa: 259,254
del.icio.us saves: 2598
Active Members: 13 pages x 30 members per page = 390 Active Members approx

graphic-design-links.com

Google PageRank: 4
Compete: 8’000 Per Month.
Quantcast: No Valid Quantcast rating
Alexa: 72326
del.icio.us saves: 144
Active Members: 4 pages x 25 members per page = 100 Active Members approx

BloggingZoom

Google PageRank: 3
Compete: 28’000 Per Month.
Quantcast: 243,804
Alexa: 54594
del.icio.us saves: 22
Active Members: 23 pages x 25 members per page = 575 Active Members approx

BlogEngage

Google PageRank: 3
Compete: 12’000 Per Month.
Quantcast: No Valid Quantcast rating
Alexa: 65597
del.icio.us saves:
Active Members: 10 pages x 30 members per page = 300 Active Members approx

We see a lot of website owners saying my site is doing really well or we have a better Alexa that this site. One of the things you will notice about some of the above Web statistics is how bad Alexa really is for judging traffic. Several sites above have a high visitor count and a low Alexa rating and others have a small visitor count and a high Alexa rating, this goes to prove one thing that is sites with a high Alexa may not necessarily be highly trafficked.

If you own a website you really should add quantcast to it and judge your unique visitor count, although it’s not perfect either it gives a far better indication than Alexa Rankings do.

From all of this sites above only really IndianPad.com, Sphinn.com, Desigfloat.com and Kirsty.com stand out as having decent visitor levels over 50’000 uniques per month. PlugIM is way too slow to visit and the others as yet don’t have enough traffic per month to really benefit your articles in the same way larger social bookmarking sites do, unless your just looking for a quick backlink that is.

All in all we were fairly disappointed to see that out of all the pligg sites that have been started no more than 4 of them are really getting any traffic, it really makes you sit back and think if starting a pligg based social news site has the potential to be a contender or worth the time and effort overall.

Many dissolussioned people have seen pligg as a fast way to launch a site filled with imported RSS feeds and adverts to make a quick buck, if valid established sites are getting so little traffic an RSS Driven pligg site must be getting a trickle if that.