Two days ago my post was submitted to Digg and Reddit, and although didn’t get on the homepage of either one, it still garnered some traffic. Everyone always talks about the digg effect and what it does to their clicks and how their site can’t handle the additional traffic and even how to avoid it if were to ever happen to you. But not everyone can get on the home page of these sites, it becomes the carrot that every webmaster/blogger/techie wants to achieve. But just because you don’t get on the homepage doesn’t mean you still can’t experience some of the same joys. But nobody speaks about this phenomenon. Nobody speaks about the “non-effect.” What is the “non-effect?” Well basically it’s what I’ve experienced, I would describe it as the shrapnel from the actual effect..
After hitting Digg and Reddit my site experience a pretty major jump in traffic. Not major jump is all relative I suppose. The amount of traffic I was receiving previous was anywhere from 5 to 10 hits a day, once it hit this is the spike I saw.
Now all of this traffic wasn’t from just Digg and Reddit. As a consequence of the non-effect I also got picked up in a news.com blog article which generated some hits as well as being number 10 in the Hot Blogs of the Day. Here’s a break down of the amount of hits I got from each across the three days.
As you can see Digg took the crown here, but not by much. Now remember, this is the non-effect so that means I got links from people surfing around on the particular sites and then clicking over to me. Which brings me to my next point. Although I got the most hits from Digg, Reddit actually provided more referral paths than Digg.
Based solely off of these findings it seems that the reddit users do more browsing of the site and will likely find your link buried somewhere deep, as apposed to Digg users who will typically only go one or two pages in. Hopefully you find these stats interesting, it’s always fun to watch your content being linked to and discussed. I thought that these findings were interesting enough to share with the rest of the folks who will be stuck with the non-effect of these sites.
Well, even this one has got on reddit buddy.
Well, I got here by reddit.
I find your data very interesting. Thanks.
Nice post. Thanks. (from reddit)
And now this is dugg, the circle is complete.
http://digg.com/links/The_Digg_and_Reddit_Non-Effect
There is so much room in this playing field. Digg folks complain a lot when they see political, religious, philosophical or funny posts pushed up on to the front page. Once the Digg people notice that, then most of the front-page stories seem to then be XBOX360 or gaming related – ugh. Reddit seems to be torn between left-ish (i.e. not Bush) stories and tech stories. There is unbelievable space to grow in this whole ’social bookmarking’ environment. ShoutWire is another one that’s torn.
I think there are really two (non) effects: (1) the traffic increase that comes from having a post bouncing around on Digg or Reddit but not making it to the homepage and (2) the effect of having a few random blogs pick up your post.
Effect #1 creates more traffic because a ton of people waste their days scouring Digg or Reddit for anything that will let them procrastinate for fifteen more minutes. As a result, even a mildly popular post will get hundreds of views.
Effect #2 is smaller, but it lasts longer. If you get picked up by a few mildly popular blogs, you’ll continue to get slightly more traffic for a long time, because information doesn’t churn as quickly on these sites as it does on Reddit/Digg, where a day is a lifetime.
This article, for whatever reason, really woke me up to smell “the new world of Blog”.
I think that’s interesting. Almost all of my hits come from google searches. By the looks of it, you don’t get a lot of traffic. Maybe now you will.
Interesting data! Thank you for sharing….
reddit rocks. Digg sucks.
I agree with you on the non-effect thing. A couple of my posts were featured on Reddit too. Predictably, I too saw an upsurge in traffic. Reddit does boost traffic and I think the community is pretty vibrant. I have been featured on other services like RawSugar and Simpy, but they don’t even come close to equal Reddit.
Because of the non-”techie” nature of my weblog, I haven’t been featured on Digg, but I think it offers greater rewards in traffic than does Reddit (and as your data illustrates).
By the way, due to your post being featured on Reddit and Digg and the subsequent hits it received, it was also featured as the “top posts” on WordPress. That’s where I found this page.
Thanks for the good feedback. And I agree, I didn’t get to many hits. But after this article hit, it got pushed to the homepage of reddit and tripled my hits.
GiGld.com is the most fun social bookmarking website!
It’s funny and looks fantastic.
reddit has little depth,
digg is tech,
shoutwire is slow.
care2.com is cool
but GiGld.com is my favorite!