Because You Asked
Ashok asked me to compare my experience of the Digg effect with this article. Here are the basic points of the article:
1. Digg users do not click ads
2. Digg users do not use Alexa
3. Digg traffic does not generate new users, comments, or posts.
4. Every site on the front page gets flamed in the comments.
5. The digg effect brings in a moderate amount of traffic and uses a lot of bandwidth.
6. Digg users are more polite than slashdot visitors.
7. The digg effect is much less on a weekend.
8. The best digg post regarding a topic is not always the one that reaches the front page.
9. Digg may or may not have positive effects on your google pagerank.
10. After a site is highlighted on the Digg front page, it will start showing up in the other social bookmarking systems soon.
My experience with Digg can't cover everything, but I will say that it was obviously a short-lived phenomenon. The graphic in this article shows my Google Analytics traffic. The first unusually tall bar is the day that my EZDigg article hit the Digg front page. Traffic returned to about normal immediately after that day. I'll talk about the second unusual traffic day in a minute.
My experience:
1. I do use adwords and I will say that I got more clicks that day than usual. But I'm not retiring on my adwords revenue anytime soon.
2. Some Digg users must use Alexa because my Alexa rank went through the roof that day.
3. I received one comment related to all that Digg traffic. I agree.
4. I get flamed no matter what I do, but it's true.
5. Lots of traffic, lots of bandwidth. Very short lived.
6. Everybody is more polite than Slashdot users.
7. Don't know.
8. Agreed. The Digg front page doesn't necessarily have the most relevant information, but that's true of any social web site. Why else would we all have seen the Numa Numa kid?
9. Likely Google pagerank won't be affected, but I don't think pagerank is affected by traffic, only by links.
10. Yes, and a front page article gets blogged by a lot of bloggers.
I do want to comment on Reddit now. Reddit is another social bookmarking site, but is much broader in scope than Digg. Yesterday I posted a link to one of my short stories there and it hit the front page. (Look on this page for "How NOT to Check Battery Life" and don't forget to vote.) In the past day I have received nearly as much traffic as I previously received from Digg, but the quality of the traffic is better. I have received many comments, I have not been flamed (yet) and the traffic seems to be more consistent over time.
To be fair, the article I posted at Digg is not exactly in the vein of the purpose of this blog, while the story I posted at Reddit is exactly in line with the purpose of this blog. In any case, I'll take Reddit over Digg right now.
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Comments
Thanks so much! I appreciate the attention you paid to the topic; I think it's really important in terms of assessing whether we're getting what we want in terms of visitors.
Recently my traffic has plummeted and I have no idea why. I think I don't have enough of the sorts of readers I want - a reader that uses an RSS reader and wants quality content from various good blogs, because he's using blogs not as a diversion, but as an essential part of learning/getting the news.
I'm not sure how to get that sort of reader, but I'm trying. I've used my Squidoo page to introduce people to what I think the web should be used for, and maybe that will help get attention.
Will be in touch, good luck with your endeavors in this vein. I gotta blog about you blook soon.
Posted by: ashok | March 29, 2006 04:36 PM
Hello, thanks for the post, I've recently been curious about Digg vs Reddit, having gradually switched from reading Digg to reddit regularly. In fact, I found this post on reddit's front page. I find the stories on reddit are both more sophisticated and more broad and more consequential, not just technology, though reddit's tech related ones are still excellent and informative. There's a lot of front-page crossposting so if I miss something from Digg it usually appears on reddit anyway. I also like reddit's interface and features better. Digg is more colorful but reddit is more space-efficient and responsive, and I prefer efficiency and speed over graphics. I might even venture to guess that other like-minded people do too, hence the type of mind reddit attracts. reddit is also an interesting result of Paul Graham's YCombinator incubation business, for what that's worth...
Posted by: Byron | March 29, 2006 05:09 PM
as a reddit user, i don't know if others do this but whenever i see a link to a blog, if i like the story, i'll go to the main page and check out some other recent stories/posts. if i like those as well and the blog looks like it's pretty good, i'll immediately subscribe to it in my RSS aggregator. if you're trying to analyze your traffic, you might want to consider how much that happens.
but that's a relatively advanced user behavior and most RSS aggregators suck so not many people use htem.
Posted by: meh | March 29, 2006 07:20 PM
I have to agree, Reddit traffic is better than Digg traffic.
I've been on the frontpage of Reddit, and Redditers are better. (Sorry Digg.)
I don't mean to diss Digg, I'm sure they are great folks. It's just that Reddit visitors are more likely to come back after you are off the front page and they leave better comments.
Posted by: Paul -V- | March 29, 2006 09:52 PM
It's true, a lot of the social websites aren't built around personal relevance. They are based on community relevance...in other words what makes the front page is based on community relevance. Check out www.zifus.com, which is a social website (in development) centered around personal relevance.
Posted by: Torrey | March 30, 2006 02:53 AM
Hi,
About a month or so ago I had an article that reached the first page of Reddit.com. What I found was that although it received a larger spike initially, others started to link to it as they found it. It landed on several high profile sites which resulted in consistently higher traffic for quite a while. I assume that the quantity of inbound links will also eventually affect my Google PR...
All in all, I can't speak about Digg.com, but I can say that being on the first page of Reddit.com did generating lasting traffic not directly from the site (there was definitely a noticeable spike), but from the amount of people who linked from it afterwards.
Regards,
Stephane Grenier
http://www.FollowSteph.com
http://www.LandlordMax.com
Posted by: Stephane Grenier | March 30, 2006 09:10 AM