figby.com

I had my first experience with exposure on Digg the other day when my article on The Gadgets Page, 10 ways to make your digital photos last forever, hit their front page. Here’s a bit of analysis of the impact it had on the site.

You can see in the graph above that The Gadgets Page previously had about 900-1000 visitors a day. We hit the Digg front page at 10:30PM on Tuesday, August 15th. We had nearly 7000 visitors by the end of Tuesday and a whopping 30,949 visitors on Wednesday. Traffic tapered off after that, but we’re still seeing more visitors than we used to: 2196 on a normally quiet Sunday, and 2430 (not shown in graph) on Monday the 21st.

The impact on our server was minimal. I assume a Digg at 10:30PM has a less dramatic effect than one in the middle of the day. Our server is built to handle the insane traffic of The Quotations Page so it was only subjected to about a 40% increase in traffic Tuesday night.

Here’s a look at the various links we gained and how many visitors they sent us:

• Digg: We hit the front page at about 50 diggs, and quickly rose to 600 or so. Now there are 1880 diggs total. Since the incident, we’ve had 27,699 total referrals from digg.com.
• Problogger: Darren’s group writing project was our first link and probably led to the Digg attention. We only had 39 visitors directly from Problogger, but there were definitely some influential types among them.
• CNET: They linked to us in this post, probably after seeing it on Digg. 3559 total visitors.
• del.icio.us: Bookmarked by 272 users, and a brief appearance on the Popular page. 2014 total visitors from del.icio.us.
• Lifehacker: We appeared in this post shortly after the digg. (I had submitted the link to them, as had Darren at Problogger.) We had 2368 total visitors from Lifehacker.
• Other links: According to Technorati, we have 77 new links from weblogs to that article, bringing our total number of links to 143—in other words, we gained more links from this single incident than from the last year of regular posting. Along with the ones mentioned above, highlights included links from BBSpot (961 visitors) and MSNBC (465 visitors).
• Ad revenue: About $20. Sudden spikes in traffic are not very profitable.

As I’ve seen others mention, Digg sends you a storm of traffic that quickly dissipates. However, I was pleasantly surprised at how many permanent links we gained in the process, and it looks like our number of regular readers has more than doubled. I look forward to more fun with Digg in the future.