Learning from my Digg Effect Failure
Earlier this week I wrote a post on the “10 of the most annoying things about the iPhone 3G“. Having written an article on the Top 10 things I liked about the iPhone 3G and having a bit more time to play with Apple’s new wonder, I thought I’d give a rounded view to someone interested in buying the phone. Before I knew it, I had hit the 1000 word mark, which is quite long compared to my average blog posts - normally around 100-200 words. I was passionate about the topic, which most of the time reflects in one’s writing and ultimately positively affects the overall feel of the post.
Minutes later, domfosnz, an active Digger, submitted it to Digg. Through the magic of promotion and networking, it slowly garnered enough votes to make it popular enough for the front page. This took around 200 Diggs to get there. I’ll write more on methods to get website pages front-paged in the weeks to come as I have only been active on Digg for a month and still experimenting.
What is Digg?
For those who don’t know what Digg is, it is one of the world’s most popular social-bookmarking sites where users can ‘digg’ (positive vote), ‘bury’ (negative vote), comment and submit website pages. Logically, the website pages that attract many diggs in a short period of time are deemed as newsworthy and propelled to the front page (sometimes referred to as “fp”) of Digg.
How many users does Digg have?
Two sites estimate (listed in ref below) that Digg has over 2.5 millions users; you can imagine the amount of traffic a website would receive even if a small subset of the total Digg population visited a front page Digg story.
This is the Digg Effect : the massive wave of visitors rushing through the internet to check out a freshly front-paged website link, where most of the times, even the most robust servers crash. A website can receive between 20,000 - 100,000 visitors within a couple of hours. To many, having this amount of traffic is both a dream and a nightmare.
Yes, My Server Crashed
To be quite honest, I thought that my website was sturdy enough to handle the Digg Effect. I have a dedicated web server (my website is the only one on the server), dual quad-core Intel processors and 2GB of RAM and SCSI drives hosted by one of Australia’s premier web hosts. Yet, if you read halfway through the first set of Digg comments, you’ll see people complain that my website was pictureless and the Digg mirror site kicking in. This is the point where my server crashed.
Digg Effect statistics
As for the number of visitors I received via Digg, it ended up being close to 35k new visitors. Around 30k more than my usual daily traffic.
What I’ve Learned from the Digg Effect:
1. Diggers don’t click on ads as much as my usual traffic: I predominantly use Google Adsense ads on my site and normally pull in around $10 a day. On this particular day, I ended up with around $14. This shows that Diggers are usually more focussed on reading the content to which they were directed to rather than be distracted from ads.
2. Need to install some form of caching for Wordpress: there are a couple out there but WP-Cache seems to be the one of choice. This makes static versions of pages which eases up the load on the servers which would normally have to perform queries to present blog pages which are database driven.
3. Be ready for a barrage of comments from Diggers: some are applicable however there are many that aren’t. This is the Internet and you’ll get passersby who don’t even read the post in it’s entirety and make random remarks. Most important thing to remember is don’t take it personal. Be happy that you received more traffic that will have good long term benefits such as more incoming links to your site and more exposure.
4. Always do spelling and grammar checks before publishing: I do this most of the time, but I forgot to do it for this one as I wrote it quite quickly in between meetings. Always, always do a spellcheck and get someone with superb editing skills have a readthrough. I deserved all the flack I received for the minor mistakes I made.
Surviving the Digg Effect
For those who think that they’ll experience the Digg Effect soon or want more ideas on how to better prepare for it, read Ivan’s excellent article entitled “Surviving the Digg Effect”.
Digg Effect References:
- How Many Users Does Digg Have? #1
- How Many Users Does Digg Have? #2
- What is Digg?
- About Digg
- What Digg Means for Servers
Popularity: 45% [?]
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