Digg is the new Slashdot (in terms of referral traffic)

Screw the slashdot effect, I just got a front page on digg.com, check out the spike in traffic (after less than an hour) attached.

 

Thanks for sharing this. Just now I gave it a try, it really increases a lot of traffic within 4 hours.

 

what is a slashdot effect?

 

I believe it has something to do with sites getting hammered with hits after getting an article posted there.

 

Wikipedia knows all.

 

For those interested, here's my data from the Slashdot effect - peak rate was 18/second. One/second is pretty decent, but still a ways to go for Slashdot. Digg is pretty decent IMHO as the "good" stories rise to the top.

 

I gave Digg a try yesterday with a story linking back to a site I have that runs adsense. The traffic spike was fairly significant (and is still noticeable today), but I saw no real revenue increase. Diggers don't appear to be clickers, I guess.

"Bandwidth vampires" seems to be an apt description.

 

I also used Digg for marketing when I relaunched one of my sites a few months back. It didn't make it to the front page, but I did see quite a number of referrals. Almost a month on, I still get the odd visitor from them, so any increase in traffic is good. I'm hoping for word of mouth to do the rest.

 

One of my sites was slashdotted last week. It had over 30,000 uniques in about 18 hours. Looks good in the 'ol stats, and a daily alexa rank of under 500 looks good too, but as someone said above, they're bandwidth vampires. Only made about $80 extra off adsense and $35 from chitika on that site by the time the storm cleared.

If earnings and ctr had been in line with the normal rates from that site I should have pulled in a cool $1000+ that day combined.

Oops, not trying to hijack the thread. I haven't really checked out Digg yet but on my way there now. Thanks for the tip everyone.

K

 

Just had a fleeting thought--

Suppose your adsense-carrying site was displaying CPM ads and you did a quick promo over at digg? Wouldn't have to worry about the fact none of the diggers seem to actually click.......

 

I think I'm going to pay more attention to Digg, and how people are using it to promote their own sites. In theory, everything should work out fair. People will digg only the better links. Though as we all know, "in theory" doesn't always work out the way it should.

 

Thanks for the tips people, I like this board.

I am of the theory that digg will amount to as much as slashdot, lot's of nonsense and crap.

Eric

 

Was thinking the exact same thing and realized as many of my sites that have been dugg I've never done it to a CPM site lol

NOTE: digg.com is mainly for tech type stuff though.

There is always http://del.icio.us/ for everything else.

 

Do you have experience in getting lots of traffic from del.icio.us? I was under the impression that since there isn't really a main point of focus that keeps links around for long (like digg's front page), that there is no slashdot effect.

 

I have used digg for relevant news and stuff I have on various sites.

Did one the other day.. didn't get a lot of diggs itself, but someone picked up some information and linked to me from their blog and it gave me a significant traffic boost for that.

 

When you guys submit a link to Digg, do you play it off like you're a third party, or do you write the summary with full disclosure, saying "my page.. my blog.. my app, etc."

 

I've had a story on the digg.com homepage and it wasn't even submit by me, but by some to me unknown reader who found the story on one of the numerous other sites that story appeared on. Infact, that was the first time I found out about digg.com. Someone on IRC said "your story is on digg.com" and I checked it out.

It certainly did boost the traffic, only adding up to the traffic I was getting for that story from other high profile sites.

The story was so popular because it was a rather controversial opinion about Debian vs. Ubuntu topic, but it wasn't written by me, but one of my site members.

Thanks
Daniel

 

Here's some real data for you guys on inbound traffic to my christmas lights webcam

In a nutshell, DIGG sent 16,000+ people at me in 24 hours. Certainly nothing to sneeze at ... but at least compared to last year's data, Fark and Slashdot were each over five times that.

P.S. Washington Post article only sent 567 ... so much for MSM sending online traffic! ;-)