The Lasting Digg Effect
Welcome Digg Users! You may also be interested in our latest post, Are You Sabotaging Your Social Stories?
Just about every blogger around knows how powerful hitting the front page of Digg.com can be. We’ve all heard the stories about the massive horde of visitors swarming over a site in just a few short hours. However, few people talk about the amount of traffic a front page Digg story leaves in it’s wake. Many SEO sites have written about the influx of links that often follow a popular story, but I’d always read about it as one component of an overall link building or SEO campaign. I hadn’t ever heard about a site that relied solely upon one Digg story for it’s promotion and traffic. So, I decided to make one.
The Idea
About 6 months ago an idea for a great article sprang to mind after a discussion with a co-worker. Originally I had planned to publish the article as a post on one of my existing blogs, but after a bit of thought decided to wrap an entire site around the article. I jumped online, was pleasantly surprised that my first choice of domain names was available, registered said domain, installed WordPress, and quickly typed out the post. After installing a new theme and cranking out an about page, HilariousNames.com was ready to roll.
The Digg
At that time I was very active on Digg and had been on a good run of submissions becoming popular. Since the site was brand new and no one knew it existed, much less that it was my own site, I decided I’d be ok to submit my own work. Obviously this is something normally frowned upon by the Digg community but occasionally you can get away with it. This was one of those occasions. The submission took off very quickly and became popular within a matter of hours. The traffic poured in at such a frantic pace that my host thought it was a DDOS attack and shut down the site. After two hours of panicked support tickets, the site came back up and the traffic resumed. In fact my follow up post (describing my dealings with my hosting provider) very nearly went popular on Digg as well. After all was said and done, the site had seen about 20,000 visitors over the course of a few hours.
The Lasting Effects
After a couple of days the blog was shelved for a different project I was working on (this very site in fact) and I decided to just let it sit to see what would happen. I hadn’t promoted the site anywhere else other than Digg and I hadn’t done any SEO work on it. The popular post did get picked up by several other social sites and the traffic over the next week or so remained fairly high for a brand new site (around 1,000 visitors a day). After that, traffic began to trail off and eventually dropped down to under 10 per day. I figured the site had probably run its course but left it up to age just in case I ever decided to come back around to it. I recently decided to check my stats for all of my sites and was surprised to see the blog is now averaging nearly 40 visitors a day! 75% of the traffic is coming from search engines with another 19% clicking over from the Digg submission. Apparently the site ranks first in Google and Yahoo for the term “hilarious names” and also appears on the first page for other searches such as “worst names”, and “worst names ever”, etc.
While 40-50 visitors a day certainly won’t raise many eyebrows, keep in mind that this is entirely the result of a single popular story on Digg. Any and all links, rankings, and traffic the site has is due to the long term effects of that single post. I mean shoot, the last update was hours after the article hit the front page. No this level of traffic won’t shut your server down or spike your Alexa rankings. But these are the results I’ve seen without doing ANYTHING else with the site. Imagine the kind of growth and popularity that could be achieved if you leveraged the initial traffic into readers.
Imagine how many more links and how much more traffic your site would receive if you were able to make it to the front page of a popular social site multiple times. Hell, imagine how much better the results would be if you simple wrote posts regularly after becoming popular. This is the lasting Digg effect, and it might just be more powerful than the tsunami of traffic Digg is famous for.
Comments
bmunch November 19th, 2007
I have always thought Stumbleupon provide lasting traffic, never thought digg could provide the same.
You want to do a similar experiment for Stumbleupon only?
Neil Duckett November 19th, 2007
Great example showing the power of Digg and social bookmarking in general …. amazing to see those figures still retuning so well after a 1 shot post.
SEO Blog November 19th, 2007
The amount of traffic that StumbleUpon can provide is nowhere near what Digg will provide if you hit the main page. I would actually say that featuring on Aaron Walls blog even in a such a short post brought to me more traffic than what Stumble, Sphin and Digg (not on front page) brought all together, and it lasted longer.
Ben Cook November 19th, 2007
Bmunch, in my experience Stumble brings traffic over a longer time period but it doesn’t lead to nearly as many links coming in. The links are what lead to rankings and at least so far, Stumble hasn’t worked as well as in that regard.
Al November 19th, 2007
i ran into this blog from the digg coverage of the “how to know your blog sucks” article.
Then I found the Rumor Mill, cause I came back.
I subscribe to both now.
Sean November 19th, 2007
Problem I see with Digg is that there just arent any decent categories to post to, unless you are writing about tech, sports, politics etc
Egonitron November 19th, 2007
I actually just posted something similar for the Digg effect on one of my blogs, check it out and compare: http://egonitron.com/2007/11/03/this-is-what-digg-traffic-looks-like/
Ben Cook November 19th, 2007
Sean, the key is to write about where your subject overlaps with stuff that the Digg crowd is interested in. Plus, there’s quite a wide range of categories to submit to and the less popular ones require fewer Diggs to become popular in.
Yuri November 20th, 2007
As a matter of fact, what you see is what I see on one of my sites. But not after hitting the Digg FP, but after a mass distribution of a couple of articles in the fall of 2005. The site gets about 300 unique visitors monthly and some of them come from the search engines (though I suspect that some of them may be spam bots).
So it doesn’t matter how you get the links, but the links do play a role for a while. No big secret about this, though.
Laser Hair Removal Newyork November 20th, 2007
Digg is no doubt great and to have your site name come on the first page is a big thing. But it takes a lot of time to gt to the top.
HMTKSteve November 20th, 2007
I wrote up a study about a year ago between the effects of getting on Digg’s home page and StumbleUpon. A few months later someone scraped the content and got my report on the Digg homepage!!! (Word for word with links changed.)
It took me a little while to get it removed from digg (I asked them to redirect it but they would not).
At the time digg brought in 60K+ hits in a short amount of time but SU brought in 3K a day for about 2 months.
Derek E November 20th, 2007
@Ben – I remember those two articles, the one about the worst names and then the one about your hosting provider thinking it was DDOS attack. I didn’t know that was you. I dugg both of them. What a small Internet World.
Ben Cook November 20th, 2007
Hehe Derek, I’m all over the place! It is crazy that despite the incredible size of the net, those kinds of “run ins” happen quite a bit. Kinda cool when you think about it.
Ruchir November 20th, 2007
Great example. Just imagine what can you do if you convert all those visitors into readers, get digged multiple times quickly and continue to market your blog. The great thing is when a page gets on the frontpage, it’s almost guaranteed that it’ll go on the frontpage of other social media sites and go popular on SU….
Oryx Orange November 20th, 2007
Amen to what Sean says above. You’d think if Digg wanted to expand outside of fanboy heaven, they’d put some thought into expanding their categories. Offbeat News can only handle so much.
Kiltak November 20th, 2007
Back in January 2005, I had several stories hit digg’s frontpage.. and now, almost 2 years later.. these stories still get me over 400 uniques each (daily), and all from search engines.
But that’s not directly the effect of being on digg’s frontpage.. it’s the effect of having a site of authority pointing to you. I’ve been on BoingBoing, MSNBC and several others, and the result was very similar.
lol November 20th, 2007
Indeed, you’ve just chosen the right domain name for these keywords to bring your website first. That’s no digg effect.
Paul November 20th, 2007
It’s called linkbait.
R November 20th, 2007
How much adsense cash did you get for all of this then? Did you break even on your bandwidth bills?
David November 20th, 2007
I subscribed to the digg rss feeds a couple months ago and use it as a launch board in gathering additional blog subscriptions to my ever expanding list of daily reads. I can see how this phenomenon can create a lasting effect on traffic and public awareness. Great post!
Linda R. Moore November 20th, 2007
Horde of visitors, not “hoard.”
Great example, though, and I think it was very smart to follow up with a “results” post.
Steve McQueen November 20th, 2007
So what about people like this http://www.bloggingtips.com/2007/11/18/stop-writing-for-digg/
Dave Nofmeister November 20th, 2007
Wow, great story. I’ve often wondered about this too, how many bloggers are getting traffic just from their newest blogs, and what the digg effect is on the older blogs that have had a chance to age.
Really, anyone that has a few nice diggs could just keep writing, and watch their site grow over time, even if there are no more large diggs after a while. Very cool.
Ben Cook November 20th, 2007
@ R – I didn’t have any ads on that site, the original intent was to launch it as a new blog but I abandoned it in favor of this site.
@ lol, yes, having the url of my choice does help but that doesn’t guarantee rankings by any means.
Ben Cook November 20th, 2007
@ Steve McQueen – I don’t think you have to alienate readers to get onto Digg’s home page. As I said earlier, it’s a matter of finding the intersection between your blog’s topic and Digg users’ interest.
Jonathan Wise November 20th, 2007
Another lasting effect from Digg: the number of spam comments.
I had an article Dugg a few months back, and that post still gets 2-3 spam that gets by Akismet every week…
Ben Cook November 20th, 2007
@ Jonathan, I hear that! I wish it were only 2-3 a week for me. Good grief. The spammers that I don’t mind though are the ones that scrape Digg and then end up linking back to me.
Those guys are ok by me
Aaron November 20th, 2007
I’ve noticed a similar effect on my blog, though none of my posts have ever become popular on digg. I am, however, still seeing traffic from post’s that where submitted months ago.
Thanks for the great article!
Nobody Famous November 20th, 2007
This is a great article…it was funny to me though, because I posted a blog post to digg yesterday, then I read this article this morning, and sure enough, about an hour later my post gets popular on digg!
I normally get like 350-500 hits to my blog and webpage a day, about 20 mins after it went popular, I had like 2700!
Peter Cooper November 20th, 2007
Y’know.. it’s probably worth a punt signing up for an affiliate deal for an e-book or something to do with baby names, etc, and promoting that on the site. Even if you only got one or two sales a year it’d pay for the hosting and domain.
Awesomeology November 20th, 2007
In my experience, StumbleUpon brings much more traffic over time. In the last month, Digg has brought me 67 unique visitors. SU has brought me over 72,000 unique visitors. Those are not typos.
Mike Huang November 20th, 2007
DIGG is only used for a particular article and it doesn’t necessarily mean the blog is interesting.
-Mike
Aaron November 20th, 2007
I had a similar experience only on a much smaller scale. I posted a post about programming cheat sheets posted it to digg, gave it a few digg’s then that very day I had gotten over 70 views after that it was only like 5 a day not sure if those were from my self though.
Mike November 21st, 2007
Something very similar happened to me. I wrote an article on my blog called “Cool things you can do on Mac” (http://silvermac.com/2006/cool-things-you-can-do-on-mac/ ) and I had a few visitors here and there. About 3 months later, someone submitted it to dig and just like yours, my site was “ddos-ed” with 68k uniques in the first 24 hours. The host shut it promptly down, but they were kind enough to let me in so I could install WP-cache plug-in and redirect traffic to a static page. This brought the blog back to life.
It took about 3-4 days to wear off the traffic, but just as you said, it has my site ranked extremely high on Google. Today (more than a year later) I get between 2500-4000 unique a day, at least 20% are to this article.
I had another one about problem with DVD stuck in MacBook pro, that had similar effect, but I won’t link it here, just don’t want to link-spam your blog, If someone is interested – it’s easy to find it, just google ‘dvd stuck in mbp’
One “Digger” a year is probably quite sufficient to keep a very healthy traffic on your site.
Cheers from Australia. Mike
Brandon Adcock November 21st, 2007
This is absolutely true. I had a pcture reach #1, it got me 70k visitors in 1 day, and I still get recurring traffic 3 months later. I made a post about it, showing analytics on my blog
Blog hosting December 27th, 2007
Front end server load balancing is a must for sites that are getting Dugg a lot.
David Bradley January 9th, 2008
One of my articles in the chemistry webzine http://www.reactivereports.com on the subject of hangovers was Dugg before I’d even heard of Digg, this is quite some time ago. It garnered 250,000 readers on the first day, which caught my eye weeks later when I saw the stats and figured out that maybe this (at the time) new site was worth a closer look. Traffic died down to normal levels soon after that spike and I don’t think it’s been Digged since…
db
Add a link to your blog January 16th, 2008
Another good post, came in from a comment over at johnchow.com. Glad I found your site, I have subscribed and I look forward to reading more.
Thanks
Patrick
Ben Cook January 16th, 2008
@ Patrick, I’m glad you like the site! I’ve been trying to keep up my comment level on his blog as I’ve gotten several new readers from just a few minutes of work each day. Anyway, thanks for subscribing and let me know if you ever need anything.
fp March 24th, 2008
Nice, I have found a few articles about digg effect saying how bad is to be on the digg first page. I prefer your version and consider closer to the truth. I’m trying to write a few articles to reach the digg first page, to see exactly what’s happen.
Powerofeyes June 5th, 2008
A cute image showing the effect of an article featuring on homepage. Digg is known to send massive traffic to a website in no time and this image is a pretty good example of it. I see a good sense of humor from the author.