|
|
|
|
Popular social news site "Digg" has a reputation for being a democratic news website worthy of competing with mainstream sources such as CNN. Both news sources focus on completely different "news worthy" stories, but a few months ago we were lucky enough to have our site listed on Digg and CNN within 2 days of each other. Now it's time to share the results with the world.
Formalities (AKA What is Digg?)
Digg is referred to as a "democratic news website" - Any member can publish an article or story, linking directly to the original source. The community then decides whether the story is worthy of being displayed on the front page (also referred to as a "Digg"). Once a story receives enough Diggs it is automatically promoted to the front page, where thousands of visitors swarm to the site at the same time. This has been called the Digg Effect and can also lead to crashing of web servers and melt-downs at power stations (well, not the latter).
You already know what CNN is, so I won't bore you with the finer details.
Digg Statistics
On the 5th of September a story linking to our website was promoted to the front page of Digg.com. Our site received a total of 76, 185 visitors over the course of 1 day (out of a total of 83,532 visitors), the bulk of traffic coming from Digg during the first hour or two of being displayed on the front page.
CNN Statistics
2 days later, on the 7th of September, the story was picked up by CNN along with a direct link to our website (I have been told this is highly uncommon). Within moments of being published on CNN our site attracted a whopping 377,606 visitors out of an amazing 438,840.
Lifespan
The next day we noticed a sharp decline in visitors from both sources. Digg referred just under 20,000 visitors while CNN had a much lower number at just over 4,000.
It took Digg 5 days to push less than 500 visitors our way. While CNN sustained its traffic for a longer period of time, taking 15 days to go below the 500 mark.
Interestingly enough the statistics show that CNN's traffic actually increased on the fifth day after steadily dropping over the first few days. We are not entirely sure why this happened.
It's interesting to note that CNN still refers an average of 300 people per day (even 4 months down the track), while we are lucky to receive the occasional visitor from Digg on a week to week basis.
Visitor trends
It was interesting to see CNN visitors who were interested in participating on our site. They spent more time browsing, commenting and generally spending more time than Digg users.
We have no ads on our site so I am unable to compare the often discussed lack of revenue from Digg visitors. However with that said, given that CNN visitors spent more time and browsed through more pages, it is plain to see that they are more likely to click on adverts.
|
|
|
|
|
