What is the Real Value of Digg? (2)

Our recent article – Is it worth trying to get on Digg gained some interesting comments. The comments are as useful as the post. Since writing the article, I’ve become more aware of some other points.

Quite often people can get over 100, or even over 150 diggs and still not get on the home page.

Some people have said that being on Digg actually gives less traffic then you might hope. (some less than 10,000). The number of visitors Digg can send varies alot it depends on factors such as:

• how long you remain on home page. (e.g. do you sped along time on the highlighted section on right)
• how attractive your headline is  to diggers – Does the topic of the article appeal to the digg home page readers
• The time of the day and week.

Digg still has the capacity to make a blog, check out The Art of Manliness

You’ve got to digg Digg to get Dugg by Skellie (example of how 173 diggs is still not enough to get home page

John from eggrage left this comment, which is interesting. But, the thing to note he was successful for an established site and not his own. I definitely agree with the bit about people who vote for an article without reading it.

I have to say though that I’ve found Stumble traffic to be far more valuable than Digg, the article of mine which you linked to has so far received about 3,000 clicks from stumble in the last couple of weeks, but only 100 from digg. I also find that a large number of digg users will digg your submission without actually reading it.

The biggest thing to take into consideration from my point of view is that indy sites don’t get on the homepage. It just doesn’t happen, and when it does its more of a fluke. You look at the homepage and the overwhelming majority is bbc.co.uk cnn.com wikipedia.org smashingmagazine.com engadget.com etc etc etc. As soon as an unknown source starts getting diggs, the digg community assumes its someone spamming their way to self promotion (which it usually is) and they either get buried, or just receive no more diggs.

That was why I wrote about piggybacking off one of the big boys, though admittedly that method is far from flawless!