The Obsession With Gaming Digg
That’s pretty much all I hear about nowadays. People left and right trying to game Digg so they can get onto the front page and experience a surge in traffic, hardcore enough to bring down their server. For those of you who have never been on the front page, or felt the Digg effect, it’s really nothing all that great. I think it’s more hyped up than most people make it out to be. Sure, getting on the front page or getting some type of Digg effect traffic surge can boost anyone’s ego, but that’s about as much fun as you’ll get out of it. Unless you are selling some type of specific product or service that is pretty creative or unique, Diggers don’t really have much use to anyone. They don’t click on ads (for those of you trying to cash in on Adsense or YPN with clicks), they don’t really stay for that long, and the worst part is that nine times out of ten, they won’t return back to your site unless you’ve captivated their attention in some type of unique way.
Some people are starting up Digg armies and groups where they Digg eachothers stories, other people are creating paid services, charging between $1-$10 per Digg, and then there are those people who will pay between $1k-$5k just to be on the front page for a few hours. You have to ask yourself something here, if any of you readers paid or did any of these gaming techniques I mentioned as examples, did the traffic net you sale or anything to increase your revenue and presence? But I mean something that altered it significantly.. Getting 20 people from Digg to come to your site a few times and then never return, just to make your feedburner counter tick up a few notches for a few days isn’t worth a damn thing in my opinion. Ah well, it’s your money and decisions, not mine.
For me, Digg traffic is fairly worthless. Yes, I really did just write that. It’s always been an information source not a traffic source for me, and I hope their spam filters pick up the Digg service gamers. Even though many of them are friends, members of forums or bloggers I am friendly with, I just don’t agree with it really. I have never really seen a blog or sites with some ads make anything worth bragging over, cash/revenue wise from a Digg blast, and if it has happened, it’s definitely a rarity or just a plain lucky fluke.
Digg was made for the sake of sharing information and news, and allowing the community of common people to decide what is newsworthy and what isn’t. By trying to game the system, and really cheating it, you are screwing up the whole point of the concept! Enough already! Stop with this overhyped obsession with Digg traffic!
The only real value I have for getting something posted on Digg is the backlinks. They rock, especially for the longterm. But you don’t have to game their system to score that. All you have to do is just post a new story up, put a link back to your page/site, digg it once yourself, maybe get one or two friends to do so too, and poof, instant IBL with some weight (not much, but better than any recip link).
So in closing, I use Digg for the sole purpose of what it was created for. As a great news source and information source. Then again, I also use Google News for real world and business information. You people should try and start gaming Google News instead. A permanent IBL from them would weigh pretty damn nicely for you, not to mention the traffic you can get would be a hell of a lot more useful to you and may even come back every now and then because they liked that one article and figured “if they got onto Google News it must be important”, whereas now, with Digg, it’s starting to become an issue. Before I click on a Digg post, the thought always creeps into my head “Is this genuine or spammy?”. There are so many other sites out there to use for traffic and links even. Sites that can send you lots of traffic of people genuinely interested in what you may be writing about or posting about. Sites that will actually bring you the traffic you need, not the traffic that will make your server melt. Sites that deliver the traffic that above all else, make you money! Because that’s really all it comes down to. It’s not the celebrity status, or the melting of your server, or the downtime and frustration thousands of people racing to read some story per second will bring. When it comes down to it, it should always be about the cash when you are trying to game some type of site or system.
Ah well, to each their own I suppose.
[...] April 24, 2007Why Game Digg? I would be surprised to learn if any of you guys have the slightest interest in getting on the front page of Digg, but still…Aojon.com has written a good article about how pointless it is for anything longterm. [...]
I think it has a lot to do with people hearing about these traffic surges and they get caught up in that. Forget that it’s generally not that targeted (nor profitable, save CPM revenue boosts).
Laura
Hey jon.
i agree with what your saying to an extent. I’ve been on the front page of digg (naturally) and it got my hosting acct suspended for a while. It wasn’t worth it. But i do think digg users are worth something… if you acquire even 1 new loyal visitor that it worth it imo. Also if you do ads based on cpm impressions then gaming digg can mean $ in your wallet.
In my experience Digg traffic is worth .03 - .06 a hit - something like $600 - $1500 per front page story.
Bunni-
Have you made money from the Digg traffic you had? And if so, what type of product/service generated it for ya? Not looking to steal it, just curious.
You can do it with almost anything, but the idea behind what I do is essentially to make the ’story’ an affiliate product. You see it everyday on Digg, blog ’stories’ that are just full of php masked affiliate links.
Heh, kinda funny you say that.. you’d think the guys on there would be smarter than to fall for that. Ah well, every site, popular or not has suckers.
The ‘Sucker Ratio’ rises exponentially with popularity.
Here is a perfect example, I’d say fully half of techeblog’s front page stories - and they have a lot - are affiliate products.
http://digg.com/design/How_Geeks_Relieve_Stress
Digg traffic isn’t about the money you make the day of the Digg - the most I’ve gotten was $400 in one Digg. It’s about the backlinks yes, but also about the 1% of people who actually stick around and keep visiting your site. I don’t know about you but I’m pretty damn satisfied if one story on Digg converts to 200 new daily visitors.
And as for your opinion of people “gaming” Digg. There is a bury feature that makes sure all stories that the masses don’t want to see don’t get seen. Even people who “game” Digg to get their stories at the top still have to have a good story or it will be buried.
Oh and I personally think Digg is worthless from a user standpoint. If I found myself relying on Digg for my news I would definitely have to throw myself off a bridge.
To me if someone were to Digg a site on my server it would be a disaster since it would disrupt service for everyone else that is hosting with me. Digg traffic is pretty much worthless if you’re trying to get AdSense money. They won’t click on your ads and they do care if your server can handle the load. If it can’t they’ll think you’re a loser. I find Digg entertaining though. That’s it.
There’s so much in terms of advertising revenue that’s based off of arbitrary stats like that blue/green bar in all of our browsers. You can’t tell me that a couple of diggs isn’t gonna push those stats up and increase the perceived val of your sites…
I’ve got an interesting article I’m thinking up…the type that will get diggs, but I’m thinking even just a handful of users and my server will choke. I hear a lot of marketers use Midphase because of good support and fast load times. Anyone have an experience with them? I sure wont try for page 1 unless I think my server can handle it
[...] are many posts about how Digg traffic sucks. I agree with those sentiments (been Dugg about 25-30 [...]
@rvb
Midphase hosts my sites and I had a story recently hit the home page of Digg. The site went down, but I got it back up that same day. I didn’t find their support good at all. They said if that happens again they will terminate my account forcing me to upgrade if I want to stay with them.