The Digg Effect. What’s that then?
Just in case you’re not familiar with the website digg.com, here’s an excerpt from the site:
Digg is democratizing digital media. As a user, you participate in determining all site content by discovering, selecting, sharing, and discussing the news, and videos that appeal to you.
In a nutshell, it’s a digital form of ‘word of mouth’. If you see something on the web that you like, you share it with fellow Digg members.
For one reason or another, I’ve never really bothered with Digg although I’ve been a member for over a year. Recently however, I’ve had reason to change my mind about Digg. My ‘code snippet’ blog elanman.co.uk has, on average, 8-900 visits a month. Not a lot by any standards (approx 30 visits a day).
Imagine my surprise when, looking at my Google Analytics stats, as I do every day, I found that I’d had nearly 200 visits that day. Checking further, I found that they were all coming from Digg.com. Why? A fellow Digger, Thomas Hardy, had submitted an article from my blog to Digg. Great, I thought, 200 extra visits was a bit of a bonus. But, as it turns out, that was just the start of it.
Checking my stats the next day showed 8000 visits!
The article had been ‘Dugg’ 167 times and was on the front page of Digg. Having all these visits to your site is very exciting but the downside is what’s commonly known as the ‘Digg Effect’. This is where your web host simply can’t handle the amount of traffic at that time. The site can become unavailable and, as happened with me, parts of the site can break (the submitted article was a php quiz which couldn’t handle so many simultaneous writes to an xml file).
Needless to say, once the site starts to fail, its popularity quickly declines. But, for one brief moment in time, I felt great!! It really was rather exciting seeing the number of Diggs increase minute by minute and I can imagine this to be quite addictive.
Once the traffic had subsided, the site recovered and everything was soon back to normal. The site still received another 2000 visits over the next 3 days but the peak was definitely over.
The moral of this story? If you want to generate traffic to your site, definitely give Digg a try but make sure your server can handle it! 
Similar Posts:
- 900 Extra Site Visitors For £8? (Hints And Tips)
- 900 Extra Site Visitors For £8? (Hints And Tips)
- FREE Ways To Get Your Business Noticed Online (Hints And TipsTop 5 Lists)
- FREE Ways To Get Your Business Noticed Online (Hints And TipsTop 5 Lists)
- Blog For FREE (Hints And TipsLikes)
[...] already … : Technorati, Digg, de.licio.us, Yahoo, Blinkbits, Blogmarks, Google, Magnolia A Look At The Digg Effect – elanwebdesign.co.uk 05/23/2009 The Digg Effect. What’s that then? Just in case you’re not [...]
Great article as per usual, a nice intro for people who don’t know what Digg is.
Watching your web traffic really can get addictive & is quite possibly the most unproductive thing to do ever!!
It is a lot of fun waking up in the morning to find a sudden rush of twitter followers or website traffic and trying to figure out where it came from.
Well done for getting to the first page of Digg, long may you continue to enjoy blog success.
Thanks Thomas and ErisDS
@Eris Yes, it is incredibly addictive and certainly very unproductive!
It’s always interesting checking out which sites have linked to an article.
Apparently, I’m quite popular in the Philippines! haha
The best information i have found exactly here. Keep going Thank you