erraticwisdom

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.