Digg Traffic Spike is not Sustainable?

Categories: Social Media Measurement, Web AnalyticsPosted on July 3rd, 2007

A few days ago I questioned if Digg traffic would sustain a long-term growth. It’s been a few days after the spike of my post on Marissa Mayer’s keynote speech (I was the only blogger in the audience that posted in real time) and it paid off.

I live my blog traffic pretty transparently, (I mean, why hide it anyways) as a social experiment as I’m very focused on Social Media Measurement to see what works and what doesn’t. You can also see previous metrics I posted on the 1 year birthday of this domain.

Findings? I don’t believe that Digg traffic provides long-term sustainable traffic for the following reasons: 1) It’s more of ‘viral’ or ’spike’ traffic that hits and moves on 2) I’m not writing about the right content that the Digg audience cares for. I may be wrong, are any of you from the “Digg Army” and have stuck with me?

While I see a little bit of a long term effect, I can’t conclude that it’s a direct result of Digg traffic. I don’t see any growth in feed subscriptions either. Maybe there’s a long term ‘imprinting’ type of effect that may happen if one gets on Digg over and over, but I doubt that will happen in the near future.

Above: Click to view a screenshot of Google Analytics, and see bump from Digg.com: Nearly 12,000 readers in 48 hours.

Above: The free service Alexa has a similar trend, although it appears more smoothed out

Above: little uptake in subscribed readers according to feedburner (which the pro account is now free for everyone)

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Social Media Measurement, Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Over at SplashCast we’ve found that a front page Digg hit has had a conversion rate of about 2% - visitors registering for an account with our media publishing service. (Here’s my account of this and related experiences http://urltea.com/kd2 ) I talked to another company at UTR that’s hit Digg popular in a niche page a number of times and they say they see between 1% and 2% conversion. That’s pretty good, I think. Perhaps analysis isn’t something they stick around for as much as services. I would caution against presuming that Digg users are either unretainable or undesirable. Congrats on hitting the front page! Your blog deserves close reading no matter how people find it. Nice to see you last week, btw.

Posted by Marshall Kirkpatrick on July 3rd, 2007 at 4:50 pm

Thanks Marshall, interesting stats, if 1-2% is still around then that means 1$ of the 12,000 is still around, awesome!

No one suggested that the Digg audience was undesirable. I’m an active reader and user of Digg myself!

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on July 3rd, 2007 at 4:53 pm

I think the Digg effect is similar to any one-time visitor influx. When I receive spikes in traffic from Digg or TechMeme or Scoble, they very rarely leave comments, visit other pages, sign up to RSS or return again. There’s not much conversion or stickiness in any of those cases. So, yes, you’re right, and Digg is not alone.

Posted by Louis Gray on July 3rd, 2007 at 5:17 pm

It seems like it would be impossible to judge from a one-time event.

Maybe it’s like other forms of marketing where people need to visit your site a few tines before you can hook them. Try to get dugg a few more times and see what happens.

I’ll bet the new traffic starts to stick after the third of forth appearance on the Digg home page.

Posted by Hawaii SEO on July 3rd, 2007 at 7:51 pm

When your content matches the digg audience well they stick around far more. I know of a couple of blogs who have had terrific launches through digg, massive growth. I would agree with the 1-2% conversion rate but I have seen 5-10%

Posted by Chris Garrett on July 4th, 2007 at 1:53 am

Thanks Chris, maybe I should do some “top ten” Apple posts or Google posts! Those seem to quickly rise to the Digg homepage.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on July 4th, 2007 at 3:00 am

My experience is that popular Digg stories are all very sensationalistic and ephemeral. It’s about spinning a story to seem bigger and sexier then it actually is.

I’m not confident that all of the people who “digg” a story to get it up to the home page actually read the story. They just see that so and so dugg it so it must be cool.

Posted by Justin Thorp on July 4th, 2007 at 7:43 am

I personally prefer traffic from del.icio.us for the reasons you mention (temporary spikes don’t always equate to postitive engagement). Del.icio.us users are generally searching for certain tags, which means that these are folks that are actively searching for specific information.

Note: Yahoo! is not utilizing del.icio.us properly. When I went to look at a news article recently for something, what did they have? A link for digg.com! Why wouldn’t they have folks bookmark these items via del.icio.us? In addition, the add photos to del.icio.us via flickr is way down at the bottom (should be NEXT to the picture).

Note: I do use digg to look at news. I am not an active “digger”, however. I prefer to utilize techmeme.com.

Posted by Damon Billian on July 4th, 2007 at 9:33 am

I agree with Justin to a certain extent. If a very popular/well respected Digger diggs a story, many others will digg it as well, just because of who originally dugg it. On top of that, a lot of people will digg (or bury) a story based on the title of the post alone.

Posted by Adam Snider on July 5th, 2007 at 8:15 am

If you want a case study… Check the Alexa data for JohnChow.com.

Look at the one year view.

You will see some huge spikes in traffic where he got on the front page of Digg several times in a two month period of time. (Then he got banned from Digg)

The average volume of traffic before, versus after is quite remarkable in his case.

I believe this is a case where repeated exposure played a significant role.

Posted by Hawaii SEO on July 10th, 2007 at 1:48 pm

Thanks Hawaii.

I think that’s one of the ones I was thinking about, but didn’t he have a post with graphs?

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on July 10th, 2007 at 3:41 pm

No graphs about his Digg traffic that I remember… He was posting graphs of his income every month but the last time he did that was in April.

I hate to drop links in the comments field so search his blog for the title of the post.

Make Money On The Internet - April 2007

That graph will show his income going from nearly zero to about $12K per month over an 8 month period of time. He still earns about 12K per month.

Posted by Hawaii SEO on July 13th, 2007 at 8:52 pm

Hey Jeremiah,

Did you setup RSS subscription as a goal in GA? If so, you can segment those people and just look at their conversion instead of guessing in Feedburner at how they contributed to subscription.

-Alex

Posted by Alex on August 14th, 2007 at 8:49 pm

No I don’t Alex, I’ll add that to the to-do list.

Awesome thanks!

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on August 15th, 2007 at 6:15 am

[...] traffic from the last time I was on Digg, the audience grows larger. The last time I was on Digg, it hit 8000 readers. It’s nearly 10 times that amount a few months later. If you’ve questions about SMO, [...]

Posted by On Digg Again on October 13th, 2007 at 7:21 am

Interesting article. I too believe that the traffic from digg itself is not extremely valuable — most of them being young kids, looking for entertainment stories. But what are your opinions on the value of the links that result from a “digging”, and the boost in search ranking that it might produce? Do you have any info on this?

Posted by J. Taylor on April 17th, 2008 at 4:17 am

[...] Jeremiah pointed out in an earlier post. Is Digg traffic sustainable? I’d have to agree with him: Findings? I don’t believe that Digg traffic provides long-term [...]

Posted by Steve Jobs and the Digg Effect « Marketing Nirvana on January 20th, 2009 at 2:09 am

I think digg’s traffic is great. It is about 8 times comparing to splashdot. Digg is popular to the world including Western, Eastern, and Asian countries.

Thanks for sharing this great article.

Jenny.