Digg-nation is HUGE! Community is more powerful than money or technology

  The Digg-nation caught on to my most recent post "How much equity to investors and employees" and it got Dugg. A Digg user who goes by AlohaMega submitted my blog post and page views immediately jumped to over 30 per minute, almost 2,000 per hour. And this was on a Sunday night at 10:00PM. The traffic continued at about 1,000 views per hour all through the night. This morning it is still going strong. Amazing.

The Digg user nation numbers in the millions. My post was only of interest to entrepreneurs and startup junkies...a pretty narrow audience, and it still got "Dugg" 228 times, and generated over 10,000 page views in just a few hours. I saw two other posts listed near mine that were Dugg more than 1,800 times. Imagine what their page views were. I don't write for the love of links or page views, but the speed and size of the Digg reaction was startling to me.

Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, is well known in Web 2.0 circles. I have certainly read about Digg many times, and have had a couple blog posts on Digg before, but never anything like this. Like lots of social community type services, you don't realize how big they really are until you immerse yourself in it, or get immersed like this.

It is about the community...ask Jason Calacanis - Technology wonks like me need to be constantly reminded it is about the community, not the technology. Most of these Web 2.0 services could be replicated by a few engineers in a month or two. That is the easy part. But building a community of millions of dedicated users can not be easily replicated. Ask Jason Calacanis. He tried to buy the top users of Digg to come over to AOL/Netscape. It didn't work. Community is more powerful than money or technology.

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Comments

[Alfred Thompson]

I hit it big on Digg once about six months ago. Like you I was blown away by the amount of traffic it sent me. One concern I had was getting used to that much attention. I had to remind myself that getting shear amounts of traffic was not my goal but reaching a specific audience was. To the extent that Digg helped me reach that latter goal it was great. But frankly I don't think it was that helpful there.
To the extent that a lot of the traffic was not my target audience and that it caused me to have to do a lot more moderation of comments it was actually counter-productive.

[Edwin Khodabakchian]

Hi Don,

Do you know if this resulted in an increased number in RSS subscriptions to your feed?

Digg is like adwords or StumbleUpon, it can boost your traffic. I am wondering how much of that traffic is converted into repeat readers.

-Edwin

[Jordan]

Yes the "digg effect" is very powerful. Hosting companies actually use it as a marketing tool for their service since Digg has a reputation of taking sites off line due to the huge rush of traffic if you make it to the front page.

[Daniel Rubio]

Its definitely a "right place-right time" moment to make something like Digg a success, its the same way with all the high-traffic sites around the web, its the first mover advantage!

A few months back my blog got Slashdotted, and while its obvious someone can create a similar or even better site than slashdot with the technology that's available today, there are only a handful of sites that can generate that much traffic from simply linking to your site.

Its interesting to note the numbers behind being slashdotted compared to those pointed out here by Digg. My post which was on HTML 5 -- a completely technical read -- was visited over 13,000 times that morning.

But as was pointed out in this thread, the more interesting details were:
- It got about 25 comments, 10 of which were garbage/spam. Though the rest were pretty good.
- The avg time spent on the article was about 30 seconds, compared to my blog average of about 2 minutes per entry (Google analytics info)
- My RSS feed subscribers shot-up to about 500 in that single day, from about 70 I had (FeedBurner statistics)

Less than a month after getting that amount of visitors via Slashdot.
- Traffic and comments have pretty much leveled off.
- My RSS feed subscribes have also dropped back to my pre-slashdot level of around 70.(Though I have no idea how FeedBurner determines this number of hits/subscribers I might add)

If its the proverbial 15 seconds of fame, then by all means being Digged or Slashdotted seems like the best way to go. But with the data I managed to get, I have my doubts how many long term/value readers one can get if you are the one being digged or slashdotted.

Of course I would have to agree on Don's initial premise, if you have that many readers which can provide 15 seconds of fame on a continual basis to different reader bases, then you definitely have something more powerful than technology or money in the short term, though I have my doubts in the longer term.

[John Milan]

To really get the Digg effect try an image:

http://digg.com/environment/Ever_Heard_of_a_Fire_Rainbow_Awesome_Photo

However, be prepared when the image has nothing to do with your market segment:

http://intelligantt.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-digg-taught-me-about-attention.html