Digg.com is not only a thriving community and great source
for news, it's also an increasingly influential website for bloggers and website owners.
It can be a heavy driver of revenue-generating traffic and can also help make your
website viral (= popular). Given its growing importance then, I thought I'd investigate
digg's stats and identify the main trends. Let's look at the official dig.com stats
first, then turn our attention to a new (unofficial) site call duggtrends.
A page on digg.com called Top Diggers shows that a select group of digg users are highly influential. These top diggers have a higher chance of getting a story digged to the homepage than other users. Unsurprisingly Kevin Rose is right at the top, with a whopping 119 of his 120 submitted stories making it to the homepage (he has a 99% "Popular Ratio")! What was the single story that *didn't* make it, I wonder?
If you order the results by 'Most Submitted', you'll note that a number of these heavy submitters have high Popular Ratios. Albertpacino has a 31% ratio (800 of 2570 submitted), BloodJunkie 26%, gwjc 24%, digitalgopher 36%, dirtyfratboy 37%, and so on. All of these folks have submitted over 1000 stories. I'm pretty unsurprised by these figures however, because it is a community site after all. So it's only natural that friends will digg each others stories.
Digg users also have their favored blogs and websites, which get a disproportionate amount of attention than other less fortunate sites (alas, I'm one of the latter). For example, AppleInsider has had at least 4 homepage diggs in the past week. A lot of times, the favored sites get dugg very very quickly by digg users. The main problem with that is that the original source for a story often gets overlooked - and the popular site garners all the diggs instead. I speak from recent experience :-)
A site called duggtrends (but the URL is diggtrends.com!?) is tracking other digg data. According to duggtrends' stats, Sunday is the least active day and Thursday the most active. Apparently most of the digging by users happens during office hours, US time. So duggtrends estimates 9:00 AM EST as the best time to submit a story.
Duggtrends says the percentage of submitted stories that make it to the digg homepage during the week is around 15-19% (using Wed-Thu as a guide). However those particular stats in Table 1 don't seem to correlate to the much lower 'stories-to-front-page' ratios in Table 4??
Duggtrends also analyzes the new categories, introduced when digg version 3 was released. Unsurprisingly, "Tech Industry News" still dominates - it had 2184 stories submitted to it in one week - "World News" was the second-most popular category with 1287. But note this comment from duggtrends:
"Stories submitted in this category probably will have fewer chances to make it to FrontPage. Most of the time these stories get pushed back in Upcoming Stories within few minutes."
Indeed the stats do show that only 120 of the Tech News stories made it to the homepage (just 5.5% of the stories submitted to that category).
Over time, as digg V3 matures, we may see the non-tech categories increase in popularity. Certainly digg's owners will be hoping so.
So an interesting look at the world of digg. If you have further digg data or anecdotes to share, feel free to leave a comment. Oh and for the love of TBL, will someone please digg this post! ;-)
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Netscape boss Jason Calacanis has offered to essentially buy out the top users on Digg, Delicious, Flickr, MySpace, and Reddit for $1000 per month: "We will pay you $1,000 a month for your "social bookmarking" rights. Put in at least... Read More
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Did you see DiggView already? It's a really quick way to get an overview per category on what's hot on Digg.
Posted by: Robert | July 18, 2006 3:25 AMLooks like it's dugg, and has 6 diggs at this point. I've never got anything more tha 20 diggs :-)
K
Posted by: karl long | July 18, 2006 4:44 AMThanks for the tip Robert, that is a useful site. At first I thought it was part of digg.com, as it has the same design. But apparently it's another unaffiliated one (like duggtrends).
Posted by: Richard MacManus | July 18, 2006 4:49 AMGood article, to help get your posts dugg, try out Integrating digg on your posts. Maybe then you will get your wish.
Posted by: Eric Allam | July 18, 2006 8:04 AMBe carefull, might not be a good idea to talk about digg stats. digg team might block your site as you are providing too much information to users (as they did it to our site).
-duggtrends team
Posted by: DuggTrends | July 18, 2006 11:27 AMYou provide some interesting data here, but I think you miss one very important point... in your opening paragraph, you say "[digg] can be a heavy driver of revenue-generating traffic." But you never quantify that. How much traffic can a homepage placement on digg bring to a site?
It turns out it's not that much. I've pulled some traffic reports for digg referrals... a few stories published by the website where I work have made it to the digg homepage. It's fewer than 10,000 referrals for a single homepage placement. That may be a lot of traffic for a blog or a homegrown website, but it's nothing for a major website.
We have a theory: Digg users read the headline and description, some participate in the comment discussion, but very few are actually clicking thru to the articles.
Posted by: chris | July 19, 2006 7:24 AM