The Digg Effect Revisited: Downstream Traffic

In the last 3 days, we were on the homepage of digg 3 times with the following articles:

• Social lending the next Web 2.0 phenomenon – Part II
• Social lending the next Web 2.0 phenomenon – Part I
• Losing weight the Web 2.0 way – Fat-Off challenge

In each of these posts, we reviewed several services. I thought it would be interesting to take a brief look at the “Digg Effect” on downstream traffic. By this I mean, the traffic that CN sent to the reviewed sites as part of the overall Digg. For this example, we will use the Fat-Off challenge article.

For the fat-off challenge page only, for the day of the digg plus the day following, we received 14,600 page views and 12,000 unique visitors. Also, the article received 395 diggs. So for all intents and purposes, it was not a “major” digg. Also, most of the traffic coming from the Digg is U.S. traffic.

So, I decided to contact a sample of the sites I reviewed and find out if they saw increases in traffic from my article. I did not receive any compensation from any of the companies in the article. While I can’t reveal which company received which statistics, I can tell you that I was very impressed overall.

Some stats from the 2-day period from the downstream sites include:

• Each site I spoke with saw a large spike in traffic on both days
• 5% of the total traffic to one of the sites came from CenterNetworks, up from 0% during the week prior.
• One of the sites saw over 80 new signups
• An increase of 1800% in pageviews on day of digg, 900% day after
• An increase of 4000% in unique visitors on day of digg, 1900% day after
• Majority of user signups to the services were predominately male

Net result

What this shows (for this contained experiment) is simply that while Digg’ers don’t click advertisements, they will “follow the web” for companies within the story. My goal in writing the fat-off column was to get people to the various sites to give them a try. And it appears that it worked. Better than my wildest expectations.