Yahoo Buzz is the latest social media experiment from the company and is currently in closed beta. Items submitted to Yahoo Buzz have a chance of being featured on the front page of the Yahoo homepage. Being that Yahoo is the number one most visited destination on the Internet, the potential amount of traffic from Yahoo to a featured story could equate to a million or more unique visitors in a single day.

Digg is currently the top dog in social news and sends large amounts of visitors to sites/stories that are featured on its front page.

I know from past experience of having stories featured on the front page of Digg. The site can easily send more than 30,000 unique visitors to a news story in a 6 to 8 hour period. Digg is currently ranked around 160 in terms of most visited websites as opposed to Yahoo’s number one position.

Now imagine if Digg has ten times the traffic that it currently has (close to what Yahoo gets daily) the 30,000 unique that I have seen would equate to around 3 million unique visitors in the same 6 to 8 hour period. I do not think there are many websites that could handle that kind of traffic for very long without a meltdown. I personally would like to find out firsthand how much traffic being featured on the Yahoo homepage could send a story I submitted.

I think with the amount of Yahoo visitors combined with potential traffic sent from Yahoo to sites/stories featured, Yahoo Buzz could very easily overtake Digg in popularity.

I’ve tried several times get on the Buzz beta but so far haven’t been able to gain access. I plan of contacting Yahoo media relations to see if I can at least get a limited peek at the user side of things.

So is Yahoo Buzz a Digg killer? I certainly believe that it could be, after all, Yahoo has the visitors and if marketed properly could become the de facto standard in social news.

According it an item on TechCrunch, Yahoo Buzz is pushing enormous traffic to sites featured on the front page of Yahoo. According to Salon (see press release) on February 28, a link from the Yahoo home page generated over 1 million unique visitors, the highest ever in the history of the 12-year-old magazine.

In addition ReadWriteWeb has a piece on Yahoo Buzz and Yahoo is claiming to have sent 16 million referrals the first two weeks that the new Buzz was online.

My question to you: Is Yahoo Buzz a Digg killer or just another social news site?

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