The life of a front-page Digg

I was recently surprised and blessed with a post that reached the front-page of Digg. This means that the post must be good, so you should read it.

I had never really paid attention to Digg before this. I knew what it was, but I didn't really understand how the process worked, or how much traffic it could drive to my site. The best information that I have found about how Digg works is this article and of course the Wikipedia entry for Digg. The main concept about Digg is that it uses tens of thousands of internet surfers to decide how good a story is. It is easy to search through these submitted stories and decide if you think a story is worth your "Digg".

Here is a screenshot of my post just as it was about to fall off the front page of Digg.


Here is a graph of traffic to my blog website. As you can see, I went from about 100 visitors a day to over 10,000 visitors on the day of the Digg front-page. Then there is a quickly dwindling amount of visitors following the big day.



After seeing the amount of traffic that Digg could bring to my site, I almost immediately decided to sign-up for Google Adsense. My goal with advertising is to pay for one meal at my favorite mexican restaurant each month. However, it looks like this goal is a little optimistic.

In the past week since I started advertising, I have made $0.23 from Google. If I can just write better posts, perhaps I can get this up to $2.00 a week? That would pay for the meal, but since Google does not send the money until I have made $100, it could be a while before I get my smothered pork burrito at Cafe Rio.

I can honestly say that I am now a Digg addict. Watching my posts go through the Digg life-cycle is almost like watching the stock market in real-time. Will this post be the next big one? Will it make it to the front-page of Digg, or (more likely) will it not gather enough momentum and sink into obscurity?

Comments

  1. Josh1/24/2007 10:56 PM

    At the very least, you have one new regular reader. I've subscribed to your feed. I've had your favorite Linux games post bookmarked for a while now. That one deserves a digg. Keep up the good work!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous1/25/2007 3:54 AM

    I've been a Digg user for some time now but I recently gave up on it. The commenting system & constant flame wars has turned me away. After visiting your digg'd post I got a few comments in & got disgusted again.

    I'll still take the traffic from Digg but I no longer use it. I prefer a community with a higher IQ.

    ReplyDelete

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