Analysing the Digg effect
Getting on the front page of Digg is huge achievement for many Web developers, but is it really worth it? On May 19th, one of our articles on Thunderbolt - The Top 10 Most Entertaining Speedruns - made it to the front page and it gives us a chance to analyse what really happens once your site gets ‘dugg’.
During the first hour of being on the front page, we received 6,583 unique visitors. To contrast, we usually get around 600 a day. The second and third hours were similarly strong, as we got 5,918 and 4,032 unique visitors respectively. The traffic then tapered off as we moved off of the front page and on to the second, third and so on.
Although Thunderbolt is a fairly lightweight site, we ran out of bandwidth within 10 hours of being dugg. During the first hour, our host told me that we were going through about 4GB every 15 minutes! We quickly adjusted the limit and continued to attract visitors though. The traffic boost lasted quite a few days, helped on by a sizeable number of StumbleUpon users.
Using Google Analytics, we can also see where Digg users are and what sort of habits they might have. They spent less time on the site than usual, viewing an average of 1.44 pages (41% less than usual) and spending an average of 2:12 on the site (31% less). 94% hadn’t been on the site before (11% more than usual) and 79% left without going to another page (8% more). 72% were from the US, 10% from Canada and 6% from the UK. As you might expect, Digg users are pretty tech savvy. Only 16% used Internet Explorer, with Firefox dominating as the browser of choice with a 73% share. 15% also used Macs and 5% were on Linux, significantly more than most user profiles.
In total, the number of unique visitors produced by being dugg was around 48,500. That’s not bad for free, but Digg and StumbleUpon users don’t interact with your website in the same way that others might. We didn’t get any significant boost in the number of forum users, RSS feed subscribers or repeat visitors. So aside from using up all our bandwidth, being dugg hasn’t really had any worthwhile effect on the site. That isn’t to say that it isn’t nice to see these sort of crazy traffic numbers on a site you work on, but it’s certainly not sustainable.
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