Uncovering the value of Digg

January 23, 2009
by Ian McIntosh

Traffic

After reading a good post on Plugin HQ regarding the correlation between the number of Diggs a submission receives, and the amount of global traffic the site receives. The research was focused on submissions which had managed to reach the Digg homepage. The full explanation of the research carried out can be found here, and the author concludes:

“…..there is a clear correlation between the number of Diggs a story gets and the amount of traffic that is sent”

Using information from The Independent newspaper, we have conducted a very similar piece of research, looking at 30 articles which have recently been on the first page of Digg. The graph below plots the number of Diggs each article received and the referred traffic (vertical axis), the horizontal axis shows the article number.

What can we make of the data?

The graphs above show no clear correlation between the number of Diggs an article receives and the amount of traffic referred, the complete opposite to what the original research had found. Lets look at possible reasons behind this:

• Domain name and content - as the Digg audience is primarily US based (more than 50% of Digg users are US, approximately 10% are UK based), could the .co.uk domain be influencing user behaviour? Perhaps the content was deemed too UK based, as opposed to globally appealing?

• Content type – perhaps the content was fantastic, but the headlines written for print were very poor at attracting users to the story. An interesting example illustrating the power of effective headlines is this article . This article attracted over 20,000 visitors from Digg, yet received only 615 Diggs (suggesting that the article content itself was pretty poor). Would this article have performed so well with the headline “The impact of technology on sportswear” or “The revolution impacting Olympic swimmers”. No. I’d argue that the Digg users (majority being male) clicked on the article with certain expectations (bikinis perhaps?), and because their expectations were not met, they decided not to Digg (one in every 33 readers actually Dugg the article).

Conclusion

Predicting traffic a site will receive by hitting the front page of Digg varies wildly given the number of influencing factors involved. Therefore, predicting traffic levels is largely a waste of time. However, what this mini-research project has presented is a strong case for additional time to be spent on writing headlines that appeal to the Digg audience, and that meet users expectations. This is not groundbreaking by any stretch, but hopefully quantifying specific examples will encourage people to approach their Digg submissions in a more effective way.

0 Comments