D.C. based Mixx.com has released statistics about their growth just one year after their launch and the numbers are impressive. In September, the site attracted just under 4 million unique visitors to the site, a more than 10-fold increase in just the last six months. The company has continuously posted exceptional growth statistics.

Just a few months ago Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb suggested that these growth statistics were not sufficient given that at the time it was only 5 percent of the traffic that Digg was attracting. Only a few months later the site appears to have grown closer to 20 percent the size of Digg. Kirkpatrick has yet to post any update but Frederic Lardinois at ReadWriteWeb did state that the most recent stats are definitely impressive.

While it’s not clear what the future holds for social news sites, growth continues to be impressive despite a lack of monetization models. Much of Mixx’s most recent growth can be attributed to the company’s Mixx Communities feature which lets users create their own custom social news site focused around topics that they think are most important.

As the Mixx Communities project begins to mature it will be interesting to see if the company can continue to post such impressive growth statistics. For now we will have to wait and see but definitely a great showing by Mixx just 1 year in.

This afternoon I had the opportunity to speak with Chris McGill, the founder of Mixx.com. For those not aware of Mixx, the company provides a social content discovery service. The key offering is that users get to categorize their content via tags rather than have their content forced into pre-determined categories as Digg and Yahoo! Buzz currently do.

I also discussed yesterday’s opening of Yahoo! Buzz with Chris and what he though the impact on Mixx was. He suggested that Buzz does not target the same group of users that his site does. Chris also mentioned that the site continues to experience spectacular growth, attracting over 3 million users this month. Much of the growth has been attributed to organic sources (friends telling their friends) as well as the launch of the new Mixx communities.

I asked Chris about their monetization strategy and received the expected “we’re not currently focused on monetization” response. This afternoon I also posted that this has become an all too familiar response. If the site can continue to grow by leaps and bounds, the company may be justified in their delayed monetization strategy. I also spoke with Chris about a number of other things, so I definitely suggest listening to the podcast below!

 

 Interview With Chris McGill, CEO of Mixx.com [16:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Frequently, when I speak with people about launching their own blog I also mention the possibility of building their own content aggregator on a specific topic. For instance if you have a blog about sports, you may want to consider including an aggregator of all the news and conversations across the web on the topic. This helps provide your community with more content while reducing the amount of content that you need to personally produce.

Today Mixx introduced a unique way to create your own community for your site or a topic and the discussions that are taking place around your site or topic. While this isn’t the open source version similar to what Reddit released recently, it is a quick and easy way to generate your own custom community. One of the interesting things about these communities is that Mixx provides you with monetization opportunities.

Mixx will share 50 percent of the revenue earned from advertising on your Mixx community. The only downside that I see from this is the challenge of getting users to your community. Without users it will be difficult to get people to submit content. That’s why I’ve suggested automated aggregators to clients in the past because it helps them consistently have quality content whether or not the community is involved.

I haven’t had the opportunity to go build a custom community on the site yet but I checked out a few others that looked pretty interesting. One of the communities I found interesting was the social news community which happened to have one of my articles directly at the top. If you want your own community for your brand, check out Mixx communities.

Marshall Kirkpatrick posted a relatively scathing review of traffic growth to Mixx.com since the beginning of development one year ago. Since its launch in October the site has grown from 31,000 to over 903,000 monthly visitors, a 2900 percent growth rate. Last month alone the company grew a whopping 238 percent. If that’s not substantial, I’m not sure what is.

Marshall argues that these numbers are extremely low considering that it is currently integrated into “USATODAY, LATimes, CNN, NYTimes, Reuters, NPR, Slate, Weather.com and an unknown number of blogs.” With the launch of Yahoo! Buzz, it appears as though other social bookmarking sites are fighting for a small piece of the pie. Initial reports confirm that Yahoo! Buzz can send millions of visitors thanks to a homepage link on Yahoo! in comparison to a comparable link on Digg which sends less than 100,000 visitors to a site.

No matter how small the pie is, it is still big enough to fight for given rumors that Digg was being acquired for $300 million. The source of Mixx’s spike in traffic last month? According to Techcrunch it was CNN.com which last month added a link to Mixx.com from each of its articles. One important test will be whether or not growth continues through next month.

Is it surprising that Mixx.com’s traffic has not surpassed 1 million monthly visitors? Not really. Most readers of mainstream media sources probably don’t know what Digg, del.icio.us or Mixx is and what their purpose is. Regardless, the site has gained traction and generating a popular story on the homepage now requires close to 40 votes in comparison to 3 or 4 when the site first launched.

A featured story on the homepage of Digg typically requires at least 150 votes. The company only launched 8 months ago and if it can continue its growth rate I think it has a great chance of becoming one of the leading social bookmarking and news aggregation services on the web. While the site may not have broken 1 million users yet, a 2900 percent growth rate is nothing to sneeze at.

D.C. based Mixx is releasing some new features today which empowers a few select “super mixers.” The goal of the new feature is to get breaking news onto the homepage fast rather than waiting for numerous votes to build up before the article ends up in the popular section. The way the service works, as Mike Arrington points out,

Once a story has been tagged by two Super Mixxers, the story goes to the home page under the Breaking News area. The story will continue to build up votes and move into the general Popular area of the page at that time. Others may drop off entirely.

This new feature is a strike against Digg which requires a significant number of diggs before hitting the homepage. Then again, a truly newsworthy story can build up a lot of buzz rather quickly on Digg, still reaching the homepage in a short amount of time. Mixx has been excellent at continuously rolling out new services but I’m a little bit hesitant about saying this new service is an excellent service.

My biggest concern is that favoritism may not be the best way to get a community built. Then again, rewarding members for being active is not such a bad idea. Additionally, just because their story is breaking news doesn’t ensure that the article will move to the popular section. Whether or not this is the best decision has yet to be decided by the Mixx community but Mixx has been quick to adapt so if the community doesn’t support it, I’m sure Mixx wouldn’t either.

After seeing Mixx at MashMeet DC a few weeks ago, I’ve realized the value in building sub-communities within the social news sites. Mixx is embracing that with their support of tags and this strategy will hopefully put them on top of other social news sites.