The Digg Effect

[PKing]

I don't talk all that much in this forum (I'm kind of shy) but yesterday we were hit by a full-fledged Digg hurricane and I thought that it would be interesting to write about it, as I've never been on the front page of Digg before. This is for Poker-king.com.

I wrote an article about the Absolute Poker situation a few nights ago. About a day and a half later, I was looking through my logs and noticed that we were starting to get quite a few clickthroughs from Digg. Someone had submitted our article in the Technology section, and we were climbing fast.

We are hosted through a really small web host that we have been with for years. I emailed them and said, you better get ready, cause there is a stampede of traffic coming. They responded in five minutes and said, we've removed all of your quotas, we're ready.

About five minutes later, we were on the front page of Digg, story #1. Our traffic went absolutely bananas. I was pretty worried about the site not being able to handle it. I programmed every line of the site, and started worrying about it breaking down under the crush of traffic that was now hitting the site.

While it was cool to be on Digg, I had mixed emotions because:

1) I was really worried about the site crashing, which would be embarrassing.

2) The story was more than a day and a half old.

3) I wrote the story when I was tired, and it wasn't my best work.

Anyways, the site mainly held up (it was down for about 10 minutes due to too many MySQL connections at once.)

Before the Digg, we had 450 URL's that had sent us at least 1 visitor so far this month. Two days later, it's at almost 1100 (1095 to be exact).

Here is our traffic for the two days prior to the Digg, and then the two days after that, including the Digg. You have Visitors, Page Views, Hits, and Bandwidth:

15 Oct 2007	2151	4804	87364	663.92 MB
16 Oct 2007	2698	6659	109361	801.69 MB
17 Oct 2007	20052	108829	2457999	15.90 GB
18 Oct 2007	19650	35793	843253	5.49 GB

Just thought that this might be interesting to some people, I had never been Dugg before, ever. I was just really, really lucky that I had noticed that we were climbing fast on Digg, or else the site would have gone down for sure.

[PPP]

The visitors to gigs comparison of the 17th to 18th is odd... same traffic and three times the pageviews and gigs?

[GregK]

I saw you at #10, then #5 about a 1/2hr later.

Nice appreciate the stats too. 15+ G's in a day lol

[PKing]

I thought the same thing PPP. I have no way to explain it.

[Randy]

What happened to your average visitor time on site? When I made the homepage of Digg, it was something like 5 or 10 seconds on average. (I never made it with a gambling article, btw.)

[Brandon]

Have you seen any increase in revenue from the digg traffic? I know many people complain that digg is useless traffic because the visitors are hit n go type readers.

Congrats btw!

[PKing]

Randy - Our pages per visitor dropped dramatically (I can assume that most people just visited the Dugg article and left) so I can only assume that the time on the site dropped big time as well.

Brandon - Every banner but one on our site is on a paid advertising deal (pre-paid) so we won't notice any difference in revenues.

The value to us will come in the increased backlinks that we have picked up (something like 700-800 now). Hopefully this will increase our strength in the SERP's and increase our daily traffic numbers.

[AceHigh Pino]

Great work again P-King....the Digg assassin, lol.

[Kyle]

I went to Digg to submit Enke's blog yesterday but saw yours and dugg it. Congrats on the achievement.

And sure, Digg traffic might not convert real well for poker players but now you have a lot more backlinks which will help the overall equation in better rankings.

[Randy]

The increase in backlinks is a BIG plus. Some of the backlinks you'll get from that (and have no doubt already gotten) are really awesome. Congrats, man.