Case Study: Digg.com, why you should use them to get visitors!!

Up until today when I thought of digg.com and getting visitors there, my reaction was *yawn*, I'll never made the front page. Boy was I wrong. I submitted my first news article to the site today, about the massive Google SPAM bust.

http://digg.com/technology/Results_of_a_MASSIVE_Google_Ban_-_7_BILLION_Pages



When it comes to traffic, I've never seen anything like this. The article made the front page and I am now getting about 100-200 unique visitors a MINUTE!!!! With in the last two hours I've got over 7,000 unique, er no, make that 7,600, er no, 9,058...you get the idea!!!!

You can see the stats right here and logs. The stats are from one page, just the article submited to Digg.

If you got some good stories, you should really try submitting them to digg.com!!!!

100% success rate at making the front page is not bad at all!!!!

It is suggested that you be on a server that can handle a good DOS attack of visitors!! I first found out it made it to the index page by seeing the site was down, so I looked at digg.com and...oh my...I better restart apache and get the site back up, I'm on the front page!!! I've had SSH top open since then to watch it just in case it goes down again.

If you can, make the page as static as possible. I'm on 100% HTML with just one SSI code, to show the comments. We've seen horror stories here where getting to the front page crashed the server, and we know what Shawn did after Digg crashed the server a few times!!! Getting a DOS attack of visitors can be good, if you can handle it.

 

I thought you owned a few servers from ev1, Nintendo?

 

I have seen many articles at digg that point to a wordpress blog, and most of the times you get to a 404 page.

Any idea if this would be caused by a bad server, or can't Wordpress handle big traffic?

 

Quick, put up some more ads

Congrats

 

About Ads, I use Yahoo there because I don't dare place Google ads there, because it'll generate a massive increase in pageviews and that's been known to get people banned. Once the traffic slows down I'll change the ads to Google.

I got one ev1 server. Every thing is on that. Around 100 sites. If Shawns server crashes from Digg, a measly server from ev1 would if it's a page using mySQL!!!

Since I re-started apache there's been no trouble.

 

Oh my love for Google..

So lets see how my Google gripes add up:

- De-indexing perfectly good content and pages and providing little if any valid reason why
- Absolutely naff all knowledge or guidance on being released from the sandbox or the development of better algorythms so that new sites don't have to sit out and be unduly penalized simply for being new!
- Banning people from AdSense for rediculous reasons beyond ones control even if all traffic and clicks are legitimate
- Finding out that competitors can sucessfully knock you out of the rankings you have worked hard for easier now if our sites aren't regarded as authorities
- Google Webmaster Guidelines advising we obtain links from relevant sites, while Cutts mentions buying links can get our sites penalized, along with obtaining a myriad of other links which can harm our rankings - how about some flippin' clarity on obtaining links? Is advertising on a popular site that places your 460 standard banner across their entire site going to have a negative effect? How can Google distinguish advertising space for 'buying links for the purpose of making a mug of our search engine' - they can't, so they should stop telling us buying links can harm us. God damnit.. how does one go about advertising these days without thinking 'Nurr could this penalized me? Google says it could, who the heck knows! I best not buy one.. Ohh but I don't know... Matt Cutts said this... the Google guidelines say this... it's only advertising.... but then it's buying links still... Nurrr what is a webmaster to do!'

Unfortunately until I can afford to build an online business that doesn't rely on search traffic (I see building content sites as a cheap way to raise revenue to build the real money sites later on which have no reliance on search engines, but the job of building content sites that earn money seems to becoming increasing harder by the day), I will detest Google and there annoying arrogance that I'm hoping Microsoft will put an end to over the next decade.

I'm looking forward to the return of Matt Cutts - I can't even imagine him blogging ever again after the recent fiasco's. He will only make himself and Google look even more like the berks they take us webmasters for with their public relations horse muck.

They have sucessfully confused this webmaster, that's all I can say, and I don't doubt that's their intention either.

Well done, Google!

Egh grumble grumble. Time for bed!

Pete

 

Nintendo, first off I'm sorry for removing your name from my referral field when I registered here (I had no idea who this "nintendo" person was).

Digg.com certainly will attract a large audience to your site. While the enormous amount of people will die down, it will still be considerably larger than if you hadn't been sent from the queue to the front page. I have not personally had my site promoted to the front page yet, but I'm hoping that one or two of my stories pointing to my site will some day make it there.

One thing webmasters should understand when they post their sites to digg in order to gain ad revenue is that they won't see a dramatic increase in clicks. Mr. Nintendo should be able to tell us first-hand that most digg users use pop-up and advertisement-blockers that work. Hopefully, with Digg 3.0 this will change. We will see an influx in those with less technical prowess. As long as stories are tailored towards the non-tech crowd, they will succeed as good revenue raisers. Currently, the fun of digg is to have extra users on your site, or just to promote stories that you like. At this point in time though, having a story on the front page of digg is revenue-neutral at best, unless you're selling a product.

 

AdSense....2,172 pageviews and a measly...one click ($1.27)!!!! *Moves back to Yahoo.*

 

Whenever I get a large influx of visitors from a promotion or when my site gets picked up by some of the bigger players I hope to get some bookmarks and returning visitors, that can be profitable down-the-road.

 

This is how I got to DigitalPoint, from Digg via the 7 billion pages post. So it might be considered conversion .

 

That's not true. I have adsense, got 50.000 pageviews in one day from digg and nothing bad happened(except that my server crashed for about two hours....). Actually I got in the first page of digg twice, but believe me it is not so good that it sounds.

The earnings will not jump as the traffic, because digg users just take a look in the site and then leave (they don't stay more than 30sec in the site)

 

Blarg!! YPN results are in...From 35,000 impressions...I got a measly $1.15, and for 3,064 impressions with Google...$1.35. *Changes back to Google.*

I'm guessing you might be able to get better conversions for geting visitors to join a mailing list since it's not an ad.

 

There's no doubt that Digg brings in a lot of traffic, but how usefull is it? Do you pick up much in terms of ad revenue or do you get a lot of links from people blogging the story?

 

Agreed... the main question is whether the traffic from Digg converts into $$$. I've got my blog dugg before (front page) and it crashed a couple of times (mySQL error). I'm not even on a dedicated server.

 

Check my last post for ad revenue. Atleast 99% of the visitors came from the Digg listing. It looks like some blogs have got it.

Logs.

Start at the bottom and look up and you'll see URLs that arn't from Digg. Like majorgeeks.com, dumpalink.com, reddit.com, netvibes.com, del.icio.us, and stumbleupon.com.

This was mostly just a learning experience, being the very first time I ever submited one of my articles to Digg. 19,759 visitors so far!!

 

Hey Ninny seen your post on threadwatch. I would have thought you'd reduced the number of exclamation marks, but no, it had to be done Ninny style.

Congrats btw.

 

I mostly did copy and paste!!! Every one knowing how I post every where, aka wacko style, is probably why they didn't get rid of some of them. I think all they did was change the title.

That's the first time I ever submited something there!!

 

Congrats on all the traffic!

 

I also got 2300 visitors in a few hours from davesdaily.com two days ago !

 

Hah. so it was your article I dug today.
I had a similar experience the other day:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=99253
My site went down and I had to deal with a lot of crap to get it going again. I feel confident that the next time I have the proper optimizations in place to survive it.
I got 2 of 2 articles on the frontpage so far.

Nice Article btw!