The Digg Effect
Advertising in the blogosphere, and indeed the web at large, is driven by page views. And Google, which also relies on page views and unique visitors to make money, is one of the best traffic generators.
However, getting traffic from Google is not simple. AdWords campaigns generate far more traffic than those placed with AdSense
because with search people express intent (and are more likely to click on contextually relevant ads). But tuning AdWords campaigns to generate a lot of traffic
is not easy since you are competing with other bidders and Google's algorithm.
Thus, many top tier blogs have begun to rely on a different source of traffic - the web's number one social news site Digg. Getting to the front page of Digg leads to a such traffic surge that it has been known to cripple web servers. Thousands of Digg users instantly flock to the source site as soon as a story hits Digg's front page, causing traffic to spike on web sites well higher than usual levels.
But Digg has a much more important role than that of traffic generator. It has become an experiment in human-based, self-organizing systems and the point of origin from which important news gets spread through the web. In this post we look at what Digg is today, beyond its bare front page, and look into what Digg's future holds.
How Digg Works
The concept behind Digg is simple. Any Digg user can submit a news article pointing to a page on the web. Once the article is in the system other users cast votes and when, based on the votes, the article is deemed interesting, a link to it is published to the front page of the site. Despite its simple description, the actual algorithm has considerable complexity. The software that powers the site is designed to make sure that the system is fair. And just like people are trying to game search engines using SEO, people have been trying to game Digg, so the algorithm itself is constantly evolving.
Valleywag just recently published a post explaining how Digg's algorithm works in 100 words. Naturally, the post itself made the Digg front page. Nicholas Carlson highlights the following factors that influence if a post gets to the front page:
- User participation: The algorithm takes into consideration participation history of the submitter and each voter.
- Submitter track record: Previous success makes it harder to succeed again.
- Diggs from top users: Rapid diggs from top diggers cause a jump to the front page.
- Number of votes: How the number of votes on the story compares to the average number of votes on any story.
- Category: Stories in Technology have more competition than in Sports, for example.
- Velocity: The faster diggs come, the more likely for the story to pop to the front page.
- Comments: The number and the substance of the comments counts as well.
Getting Dugg
If your submission hits on all cylinders of the Digg algorithm, and your site makes it to the front page of Digg, then you and your hosting company are in for a treat. Digg hits can come at a rate of 1 hit per second. That's 60 hits a minute and 3,600 hits per hour! Lets put this in perspective. The front page alone has 15 stories, so it originates 54,000 clicks per hour or 1.3M clicks per day. This is a huge number.
We know that Digg hit 1 million registered users back in March. What is interesting is to estimate the number of users actively watching the front page. Assuming that a watcher has time to check all stories during a one hour period, then there are at least 3,600 people at any given time who are actively watching front page.
But the Digg front page is not only a hot place to get a link published, it is a filter in the bigger game of information dissemination on the web.
Digg and News Dissemination
Digg is a filter. It may not be perfect, but it is a human-powered information filter. What passes through is what is interesting to people, or more precisely what is interesting to Digg users. Lets take a look at the role that Digg plays in the news ecosystem.
News that originates at media companies and in the blogosphere follows along a few paths. First, raw news come to aggregators like Bloglines, Google Reader and Netvibes. Another flow is to the automatic popularity sites like Techmeme. Unlike Digg, Techmeme is powered by an algorithm and computes popularity of stories based on the number of sources talking about it and linking to each other. The third pass is through Digg, which is a human-powered news filter. The best stories that people find are bookmarked and stored permanently on sites like del.icio.us.
The most interesting path is of those stories that get to the front page of Digg and then get stored on sites like del.icio.us. These stories would appear to be both interesting today and carry long term value, since people bother to bookmark them. Google has been utilizing this path in its index, giving a heavier weight to these results.
Digg and Self-Organization
Beyond news, there is another very interesting aspect to Digg. It is one of the most successful human-made, self-organizing systems. For the past few decades, scientists have been discovering how seemingly simple rules give rise to Complex Systems. One of the major principles that they discovered is the principle of Self-Organization.
Self-organization is a truly remarkable phenomenon present in diverse physical, biological and social systems. The phenomenon is at the very heart of how a galaxy forms, how ants cooperate in colonies, and how humans form societies. Biologists use self-organization to study pattern formation on animal skins, flocking behavior in birds, and auto-catalytic chemicals that seem to explain the origin of life itself.
While self-organization works naturally, it has not been easy to reproduce via engineering. And this is another aspect of Digg that is very interesting - it is a scientific experiment in human-induced self-organization. True, the system is not entirely self-regulating, since the company had to improve the algorithm to protect the system from abuse. Yet, for the most part it really is more or less self-regulating. The recent example of exposure of the HD-DVD key underscores that Digg has a life of its own.
The Digg Effect
Digg is important in many ways. It is one of the pioneers of social software; it is one of the first man-made, self-organizing systems that actually works; it is a filter which sifts a lot of the the signal from the noise of the web.
What is Digg's future? It depends on many factors. First is the question of monetization - can Digg be a sustainable business on its own? According to Alexa the traffic has not been rising. There have long been rumors of a possible acquisition, and if that happens, the future will depend on who acquires the site. In any case, it is unlikely that a direct standalone competitor will emerge to overtake it.
Likely, more and more sites will continue to incorporate story voting. But that is not really a threat to Digg. The whole point of Digg is that it is a web-wide news filter, so silos can not rival it. This is what a lot of people miss - the magic is in Digg's distributed nature and aggregation, not in the ability to vote on the stories.
How do you use Digg? What do you like and not like about how it works today? Let us know in the comments below.
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Absolutely wonderful article, I don’t use digg much though I am registered user but I always wanted to know how it works and can it really be used to generate traffic for your new blogs. Those numbers in the posts are remarkable. Thanks Alex for writing it for us.
Alex, well written!
Digg has always been a favorite for those carving for knowledge and traffic.
While I think its undoubtedly true that Digg generates traffic - you would have to question the type of traffic. It would seem that the majority of users on Digg are male, and therefore there votes are swayed to male influenced story genres. In some sense its a swarm mentality such that if your story gets posted by a digg member with a hell of a lot of friends and is popular - then chances are you will get the front page.
I love digg dont get me wrong - but there are positives and negatives to using it.
I have used Digg more as a sharing then a popularity platform. I digg articles I find interesting, and make Digg-friends whose Diggs I also have a look at. I suppose I've added my own layer to the filter by scanning through my contacts and groups for interesting or helpful topics. I know that certain people digg or submit news which will be most relevent or interesting to me, so I tend to check out those diggs first. Since there are many of them, I don't tend to spend much time on the Digg front page, because I simply run out of time.
-Zach
I don't use it anymore, I have moved on. One thing digg is for is coming across new sites to add to your reader.
I think its still fairly easy to game digg if you know how and have the ability to do it.
Nice article, Alex. I am inclined to agree with Comment 3, inasmuch as certain types of items seem to always end up on the front page. Granted, they are usually great pieces, if a bit myopic in scope.
That said, I still remember the feeling that I got when I saw my first digg. It was... nice.
in the words of King Crimson:
Dig(g) Me!
I recently wrote an article about the large number of Digg wannabes popping up all over the place. The purpose of the article was to get bloggers to rein in the number of "Digg me" icons at the bottom of their posts.
In reality,it's better to find one or two Digg wannabes that have a niche audience similar to your own and focus on that. The Digg effect is very good at crashing servers and not so good at building long term readership. The niche sites like designfloat.com will do a better job of that.
Digg is very inefficient in many areas. The worst part about it is that they don't listen to their users. For example, the pictures section took nearly an year to implement. My take on Digg and other social news sites: http://abcdefu.wordpress.com/2007/12/01/open-social-media/
One visitor from Search for 100 visitors from Digg.
we surely take the Search visitor.
Alex
Interesting article - and a good overview of the direct and indirect impact of Digg.
I'd be interested in your thoughts on the side-effects of Digg. Because Digg focuses attention on topics that tend to be ones of interest to heavy net users and content producers, it has the same effect as TechMeme - generating additional content and links on these topics.
Because of this, Digg seems to have a secondary effect of shaping search results and even the growth of content on the Internet.
I'm not sure if that's good or bad. Like TechMeme, it seems to encourage me-too posts and a lot of discussion of inane topics. But it also helps spread important information very quickly.
Great article. The only thing I disagreed with is the statement that competitors will not be able to beat digg. The only thing a competitor needs is an extremely compelling hook that digg lacks. Examples?
Profit sharing like:
http://www.nerdynews.com
Or niche focus like:
http://www.killerstartups.com
great info thanks for explain how to use Digg and it power
I look forward to more informative content on marketing
wow, I DIGG this article on Digg! :) Seriously though, thanks for explaining how it works!
Thanks Alex for your informative article. I wonder how Yahoo and Google, who are on a buying spree, haven't eyed Digg yet. Or did they? And thought there's no future for Digg. But, for now, Digg is still the best instant traffic generating machine.
I discuss the Digg effect in an e-book called The Web: Hidden Games. It is available for download at http://www.lulu.com/content/1269306 for free. Various strategies and uses for Digg are also analyzed. This book reveals how websites such as Digg, Youtube and Facebook can be viewed as games (even though they weren't designed as such), and how this perspective is beneficial to both web designers and users.
Off topic a bit, but does can anyone point me to information on how a crawler or indexer pulls keywords from web pages? I see that del.icio.us uses a combination of a user's and other users' tags to make recommendations when saving a new article and I curious to research and learn the details of how a piece of software determines what's a relevant keyword or not
Thanks
I run a hosting company, and a popular Digg story can generate far more than one hit per second. We've seen traffic in excess of six page views per second directly from Digg, for well over an hour solid. It's not fun watching the server load go through the roof if the site does something resource-intensive, such as several database writes per page view for ad tracking :-(
a couple of years ago i had a page land on digg. it was cool for a while and like #17 mentioned, my page exploded and i couldn't post anything for 3 days. it's definately a positive/negative.
A low ranking on Alexa does not indicate that the traffic is not being generated on www.google.co.in, www.search.yahoo.com and www.search.msn.com search engines.