CyberNotes: The Analysis of a Digg Effect 4X in 10 Days
Free For All Friday
An article making the front page of Digg and the effects on the website it came from is jaw-dropping to say the least. It effects everything from the obvious such as traffic to the not so obvious like new RSS subscribers and dedicated readers. From July 1st-July 10th, CyberNet News had 4 articles make the front page of Digg. For those that may be unfamiliar with Digg, (although chances are if you’re reading this, you’ve heard of Digg) it is a ‘user driven social content website.’ Users submit cool articles they find and the community of Digg votes on the articles they like. The articles that get enough Diggs end up on the front page where the masses come to get the latest cool news. This is essentially an analysis on the 4X Digg effect we experienced complete with crazy graphs that speak for themselves on the powerfulness that Digg can have.
–Visitors/Traffic–
The obvious effect on a website after a front page Digg article is the huge increase in visitors and traffic. The four articles that made the front page of Digg were:
- Firefox 2.0 Gets Undo Close Tab & Scrolling Tabs (July 1st)
- 9 Screenshots Of Firefox 2.0’s New Preferences (July 7th)
- Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 Candidate Now Available (July 8th)
- How To Tweak Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 (July 9th)
Get the trend? All four articles were regarding Firefox which tells us a lot right there! We keep track of our stats with a free program Google has called Google Analytics. They provide you with every statistic imaginable, and display them in useful graphs.
Above you can see the huge jump in traffic almost instantly after article #1 hit the front page. It literally makes it appear as though we had no traffic all day, which wasn’t the case. Article one peaked with about 2,500 visits for the hour, however traffic remained pretty steady afterwards and thus far has attracted 24,000+ pageviews. Pageviews combined for all four articles have totaled nearly 150,000!
To the right is another graph that nearly speaks for itself. The blue section of the graph represents Digg. Nearly 87% of our visitors on July 1st came to us because of our Digg article. Absolutely Insane.Typically our graph looks like a well balanced pie chart with pretty equal portions. Not so on “Digg Days.”
–Bandwidth–
Of course with an increase in traffic comes an increase in bandwidth, especially on a ‘Digg Day’ when there is a sharp sudden increase in traffic.As a side note, a Digg Day really could turn into a D-Day (a.k.a Doom’s Day) if you’re not running on a reliable server! The picture below depicts this so well, really there’s no need for an explanation!
However, here are a few details about what’s going on in the graph. This depicts article number 2 which made it to the front page on July 7th. This ended up being a short lived article on Digg as enough people labeled this as “lame” (hey, it wasn’t that lame now was it?) and it was removed from the front page– one of the effects of users controlling the content. The graph does a good job of showing just how quickly the bandwidth spikes to all time highs and then returns to a steady flow. The article contained 9 large screeshots which is why it peaked so high.
–Browsers/Operating Systems–
With 4 articles all regarding Firefox making it to the front page of Digg, it’s not hard to figure out which browser was most prevalent during our ‘Digg Days.’ You guessed it, Firefox with about 75% of the users and Internet Explorer next with around 12%. Both Safari and Opera had about 4% of the share. As a funny side note, one of the browsers listed in the statistics was named ‘I am using a browser and OS so new and innovative that you will never have heard of it proof that someone altered their browser with a new identity’ you know who you are, identify yourself and this ‘innovative’ browser you’ve got. Yes, Google Analytics really does give you every statistic imaginable.
The operating system graph looks very similar to the web browser graph with 80% of visitors using Windows. Around 12% were Mac users and 7% were Linux users. Somewhat surprising, this shows that people are still more comfortable with open source software versus an open source operating system.
–Overview–
The ‘Digg Effect’ as it’s called, really does affect a website in more ways than one. Each time an article makes the front page of Digg we end up with more RSS subscribers and dedicated readers something that any blog such as CyberNet strives for. It also makes for some good entertainment after all is said and done and you’re left with roller coaster appearing stats and graphs. Case in point below
Bandwidth
Traffic
And of course, if you liked this analysis, Digg it!
| Update: |
We also forgot to mention that the graph above that plots all of the Digg articles has a large dip because we switched hosting providers. As a result we were down for a few days.
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This is just one of the hundreds of CyberNotes we have done. You can find more of them by visiting our CyberNotes category, or by subscribing to our CyberNotes feed. We also have a full feed available if you want to receive all of our articles in your reader!
Tags: CyberNotes, Web Sites
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Yep, that is quite something. Happenened to my site few times and I had to actually reduce graphics not to pay for extra bandwidth. And I guess Digg popularity hasn’t yet reached it’s peak, so many sites are waiting to be put offline by the pressure
Ryan
Good job, it shows that you are writing good, bleeding edge material. Digg users can be a little like party crashers, in as much as they can be kind of disruptive and leave you cleaning up a mess. However, if you manage to keep your site up during the peaks and you can maintain control of the comments it can be a great experience.
And try not to pay any attention to the trolls, the old adage is certainly true:
Keep up the good work.
DavidC
DavidC,
Thanks for stopping by!We’ve been reading your site for quite some time now. And yes, sometimes Digg users can be party crashers.
–Ashley
What’s stronger the Digg effect or the Slashdot effect?
CyberNet has only had one article on Slashdot, and that was back in April. The same article was also on Digg but we received far more people from Slashdot. However, Digg has recently become quite popular and according to Alexa Digg is receiving more traffic. So I guess the Digg Effect could be larger now.
-Ryan
My security blog entries made it to the front page of Digg 4 times in a two week period in April. Each time generated 30,000 hits. But long term effect seems to be small. The best way to appeal to Digg followers is to write about Internet and web stuff as well as general interest. A more esoteric topic will not pick up very many return readers.
Just curious: is this surge in traffic reflected in your ad clicks? This site isn’t heavily loaded with ads, but I wonder if you at least made a few extra bucks with all the new visitors.
Darby: Each time an article makes the front page of Digg we typically see about a 3x increase in revenue from clicks. So yes, a few extra bucks.
Also: It appears as though this article got burried on Digg- another example of users controlling the content. People have written similar articles analyzing the Digg Effect before. I\\\’m sure it was marked as a duplicate. Thanks for all of the Digg\\\’s though!
-Ashley
Dios, ¿quién ha traducido esta página al español?. Les sugiero que busquen a un lingüísta lo antes posible. Y que sea nativo.
-LC
This article is translated using the Google translator. Unfortunately we do not have someone that is able to translate our articles for us. Sorry for the bad translation.
-Ryan
Here another fine Digg Effect analysis.
Great to see Firefox is getting y’all on the front page of Digg. Especially the ‘Tweaks’ article, very, very useful information in there. Keep up the good work y’all!
Load balancing and multiple front-end servers do help with Dugg affect. This is of course a bit more expensive to host, but still well worth it if you get Dugg a lot.