Post
The digg effect - a visual analysis
A couple days ago, my list of the top 10 redesigns of the year was “dugg” to the front page of the popular digg.com.
I took a few screenshots of the action, so let’s get started:
It all started when my article was pushed up to the very top of the front page. I’ve submitted some of my other articles to digg before without much success, and this one seemed no different. I submitted it about a full day before it was promoted to the home page, so I really wasn’t expecting it.
The stats here are from the wonderful Mint and an assortment of peppers. After getting on the front page, things went crazy, getting over two thousand hits during the first hour. The traffic eventually stabilized, but at a higher level than before the digg.
This table shows the number of hits I usually receive in the right column (about 200-250 per day) as well as some figures from earlier weeks and months. As you can see, the first day following the digg produced more hits than a very successful month under normal circumstances.
The left column gives the number of hits by hour. As time passed, the story moved farther and farther down the digg front page and therefore received fewer and fewer hits.
I didn’t expect the digg to produce any more dedicated readers (ie. feed subscribers), but it did give a slight boost. The image above shows that there was a decent increase in subscribers, although it seems that the number has faded significantly according to my current “live circulation” according to Feedburner.
Since the article was primarily about other sites, it was logical that I would create a few “outclicks” to the sites described. It’s interesting to see which sites seemed more interesting to the visitors.
Suddenly, the dugg article is a number of times more popular than my own home page.
As a result of the digg, enough people bookmarked the page to put it on the delicious popular page. This ended up giving only a trickle of hits compared to the digg, but still a considerable amount.
Ad revenue for the day was only a touch above average. Digg readers are obviously only interested in the content and either use ad-blocking extensions or have learned to ignore ads.
My site went down sporadically over the course of the evening, but usually recovered fairly quickly so the numbers were probably not terribly skewed because of this.
Overall, if I have one more reader because of this I’m happy, and I think the odds are with me on this one.
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Comments
Andrew Kaufmann
Dec 23, 11:01 PM #
Garri
Dec 24, 01:53 AM #
Joe
Dec 24, 03:10 AM #
nice to know that your on TXP
shishira
Dec 24, 04:36 AM #
Thanks for collecting the info.
pillguy
Dec 24, 05:31 AM #
derek_farn
Dec 24, 05:54 AM #
PvUtrix
Dec 24, 06:21 AM #
Nick
Dec 24, 06:28 AM #
Garri: I was actually impressed that my site didn’t go down more often or earlier. At the peak of the digg, the site was receiving over 20-40 connections per second. When the site did go down, it seemed to recover fairly quickly and there was no dramatic slowdown. I’m on a basic shared server, but if you expect a much larger traffic increase than what I saw, you might want to move to a dedicated server.
Joe: I agree, and I will definitely be recommending Dreamhost to friends and clients.
shishira: Nice to see you’re still coming back shishira. Yeah, Textpattern can handle it with no problems :D
pillguy: You’re welcome, it was definitely an interesting experience and I’m looking forward to comparing the weekend digg of this article to the last one.
derek_farn: Thanks, that’s interesting.
Thame
Dec 24, 06:29 AM #
ravi
Dec 24, 07:56 AM #
Paul Stamatiou
Dec 24, 07:56 AM #
jb
jay bee
Dec 24, 07:58 AM #
the good – I am going to look into dreamhost now because of this article and the user below commenting on it. You should have had a sponsored by and maybe got revenue that way. Maybe next time.
the bad – your site is broken. Linux+Firefox = your ads push and flash when you mouseover the center column they move the yahoo ads over your main content on the left. For a site with Design Templates that doesn’t make a very promising statement.
-Sev
Severis Sionnach
Dec 24, 08:29 AM #
This is my affiliate link for Dreamhost. If you do choose to go with them, please use the affiliate link because I am donating all revenue from this site to a charity of the month (Doctors Without Borders for December).
About the flickering, I’m looking into it. I believe it’s a result of the bottom border on the link hover and I’ve changed it to a basic underline. Please let me know if you’re still having the same problem. As a side note, none of the Textpattern templates are my own design. They are all ported from other popular CMS’s.
jay bee: It’s a problem I’ve been having with the Yahoo! Publisher Network for a while now. Hopefully, when the program is out of Beta the targeting will improve.
Paul: Yeah, I’ve noticed that too.
Thame
Dec 24, 08:45 AM #
Just a final note, I have read somewhere that getting digged doesn’t affect your alexa rankings much, however my alexa rank for this week is about 30.000 and before getting digged it was about 300.000
My conclusion is that the results of getting digged may be different for different kind of sites.
stockart
Dec 24, 09:44 AM #
notflickering anymore.If I knew you were going to jump on it I would have given more details about my browser.
Firefox 1.0.7 + adblock ( no I don’t block everything in hopes that others will do the same. (Ubuntu Breezy Linux 1280×1024 )
**I have a blog myself devoted to my photography and traveling.
Which is why I was looking for a new host. Godaddy is cheap but their control panel and management leaves a lot to be desired.
I will use your referral button. Do you use the dedicated server or the 7.95/mo plan? ( sorry if I missed that in the article)
Kudos for fixing the site. Sorry about the attitude. I’m too jaded sometimes.
-Sev
** http://www.rickware.com/blog
Severis Sionnach
Dec 24, 10:03 AM #
Roomba
Dec 24, 10:23 AM #
I hope you enjoy it. :)
Kyle Rove
Dec 24, 10:49 AM #
I’m on the $7.95/month plan. It has more space and bandwidth than I know what to do with (even with all these diggs :D).
No worries about the site suggestions, any tips you can give are great.
Roomba: Like I said in the article, if I get even a single new reader because of all this traffic, I’m happy.
Kyle:
What I like about Fresh View is that it’s not only very useful, but it’s beautiful and really fits in with the rest of my Mint. Great work and thanks for a wonderful peper.
Thame
Dec 24, 10:59 AM #
Congrats Thame!
Mike Rundle
Dec 24, 11:05 AM #
Thanks Mike
Thame
Dec 24, 01:36 PM #
miscblogger
Dec 24, 03:52 PM #
david
Dec 24, 11:45 PM #
David: http://www.haveamint.com/
Andrew Kaufmann
Dec 25, 04:39 AM #
The statistics program is Shaun Inman’s Mint and the graphs themselves come from Kyle Rove’s Fresh View plugin which uses SVG to create a lovely graph of visitor data.
Thame
Dec 25, 07:13 AM #
Veracon
Dec 25, 07:18 AM #
Thame
Dec 25, 12:12 PM #
Thanks!
Derik
Dec 26, 04:51 PM #
My statistics package does not track bandwidth, but I was able to see the large increase in bandwidth usage through my admin panel. The exact number was around 6-7GB’s per day that I was dugg. Keep in mind that each post had a number of 100+ KB images.
What’s most important is that you have enough bandwidth for a digg and the ensuing chaos. It’s a chance to lure in some readers and you don’t want to lose that just because your host wasn’t too good. If you decide to change hosts, I recommend Dreamhost (Referral link) becuase they have very affordable and huge packages that grow every week.
Thame
Dec 26, 08:17 PM #
I am also on Dreamhost – I’ve been there for a little while – my views on BW requirements are a bit jaded by the fact that most of the time content I release (not digg-based) is videos (just in the last 24 hours I’ve pushed almost 700 GB on various mirrors). I take it for a regular post with some images (or even a bunch) would easily be able to handle a digging (just as long as the account stays up – which it sounds like it did pretty well on Dreamhost).
Glad to hear it.
Thanks a bunch Thame, and good luck with more Diggings in the future!
Derik
Dec 26, 09:11 PM #
See everybody went to my site to play Sega Genesis and Nintendo games online, only there is a quick way to change games and a few people just kept changing games over and over again. I am grateful to digg, but am now considering limiting number of games one ip address can load in a day.
James
www.thesmartass.info
James
Dec 26, 11:34 PM #
tom
Dec 27, 02:15 PM #
James: I can see how that could cause a problem. I’m not really sure why my server went down – mainly because I don’t really understand how that works – but I assume it was a result of the sheer number of connections that was happening. At one point, I was refreshed the hit count every second and the number was increasing by about 50-60 each time.
tom: Thanks. I’m glad that the somewhat rougher commenters seem to leave their thoughts on the digg page although I did have one person make the effort to directly send me an email describing what an idiot I am :D
Thame
Dec 27, 04:09 PM #
Oferty Pracy
Jun 19, 12:25 PM #
Jasper
Aug 31, 04:21 AM #
Togggo
Sep 1, 04:46 AM #
linportal
Sep 10, 05:01 PM #
Thame
Sep 10, 06:06 PM #
I am getting nailed with Spam in my guestbook for our catalog website. Is there anyway to stop this? If not, there really isn’t any point in leaving it up and active. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
katalog
Sep 27, 02:37 AM #
also, this made me wander over to Mint for one of our sites. Thanks for the screenshots of it :)
jpea
Oct 5, 02:06 PM #
jpea
Oct 5, 02:07 PM #
jesgirl26
Dec 14, 12:44 AM #
I hope you enjoy it. :)
eMule Forum
Dec 19, 01:43 AM #
Serwery emule
Dec 19, 01:46 AM #
Ron
Dec 22, 06:21 PM #
John
Jan 2, 10:23 PM #
Great posting! Thanks
comonetwork.com
Ciprian
Jan 25, 12:24 PM #
Its all right
projektowanie stron
Jan 28, 12:56 PM #
Supreme concept of a personalized web portal.
I look forward to using this as my browsers’ start page
Thermage
Jan 31, 04:31 PM #
Keep up this good work.
Thermage Hamburg
Feb 5, 07:33 AM #
Thanks a load for the stats. Haven’t seen anything nearly as comprehensive or useful anywhere else.
Maelenna
Mar 18, 09:08 PM #
What other sites are there like ‘Digg’?
Michal Dodson
Apr 23, 09:23 PM #
Totally dig your“pain”..
Last year in February one of my posted articles was Dugg and then proceeded to almost immediately go viral. The rush to my site was so overwhelming that it completely disabled the server for the first 3 hours.
Over year later my stac still dig it if you know what I mean.
Declarative Application Models
May 20, 04:55 PM #
I think these blog is really useful for new comers and Excellent resource list.
Handysprüche
May 29, 03:55 AM #
GOod job,
Best regards,
Jelenia Góra – Jelonka
jelonka
Jun 5, 07:41 AM #
Thanks for this. Always wanted to know about the digg effect
Sam Allcock
Aug 13, 02:40 AM #
Profesionally prepared and informative graphs. Keep working :)
Rejsy Morskie
Sep 20, 02:45 AM #
What a fantastic analysis, thanks very much.
Randki
Oct 7, 12:01 AM #
cool! I experienced pretty much the same thing when my blog was dugg. its an exciting experience to watch the stats!
Pelikan
Oct 15, 11:46 PM #
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