Thoughts 05 May 2008 10:28 am
Digg effect
I’m the admin for several sites, so I run Google Analytics on them. This morning I noticed that 5 of them had large spikes in the number of visitors Saturday and a severe fall off yesterday.
It turned out to be the Digg effect. something got dug and then people followed the links on that blog to the other sites.
The blog in question was titled “Underwater Cockroach” and contained a couple of pictures with a link to the Wikipedia article.
My guess is the digg got buried as a dupe. I saw a digg not to long ago with a bunch of pictures of weird sea creatures and the giant isopod was among them.
I have no idea where Old Dude found his material, but for a brief period his server slowed down, and now it’s back to normal.
My point is that social bookmarking makes a difference.
It can drive traffic to you sites, but this traffic tends to come in bursts, so unless you promote your site regularly diggers and others like them are going to visit once and are not likely to come back.
The slowest site I babysit normally gets 5 or 6 visitors a day. It suddenly got 50+, that’s a 10 fold increase in traffic.
If you have something to sell this approach can work as long as you don’t get reported as spam.
On the other hand, if you are editorializing or reporting, this is great. You get your message out to more readers and you get increased traffic, which in turn helps sell ads.
In closing. Here is the picture everyone liked so well.
Sure looks like a cockroach to me.