The Digg Effect and Me
Today marks seven days since my post of a burning lightbulb made #1 on the news aggregate website digg.com. I have always heard about "The Digg Effect" (a term to refer to the huge influx of traffic generated by a story on digg) and wondered how much traffic is generated. Now I know.
Prior to February 5th, this website averaged around 300 - 400 visitors a day. While this is not a huge number, it had been gradually growing over the 14 month period of the site's existence. Then the story hit on digg and here is what happened:
Monday February 5 - 126,742
Tuesday February 6 - 25,258
Wednesday February 7 - 12,199
Thursday February 8 - 6,211
Friday February 9 - 4,310
Saturday February 10 - 4,216
Sunday February 11 - 3,776
That's 183,716 page loads from 158,312 unique visitors in the past week. If I remove my previous average of 300-400 per day, that is over 180,000 hits generated as a result of the digg story. Wow!
One thing I didn't expect with the notoriety on digg was the amount of traffic from other websites that this would create. While digg generated most of the hits the first day or two, other sites began referring hits to me. Here is a breakdown of where the most of the traffic came from over the past seven days:
digg.com - 63.86%
reddit.com - 10.06%
direct - 5.40%
stumbleupon.com - 4.30%
monitor.hr - 2.25%
bluesnews.com - 1.38%
clicked.msnbc.msn.com - 1.35%
A frequent outcome of websites being dugg is that the server is unable to handle the huge increase in traffic. In my case, this traffic was approximately 10,000 hits per hour in the first 12 hours of being on the front page of digg. LeggNet.com handled the traffic extremely well with the only hiccup being a slight slowdown on Monday afternoon that required a reboot. Thankfully, I have unlimited bandwidth on my hosting account.
My hope from this experience is that some of the visitors that have found my site in the past week will continue visiting. The increase in comments and email has been great. Thank you.
-Rich
p.s. If you'd like to monitor LeggNet.com via RSS, please add http://leggnet.com/rss/leggnet.xml to your reader.
9 Comments:
This is one of the reasons why Digg is one of the sites that I go to everyday. Without this great site, I wouldn't have discovered this even better one. I'm just starting out in photography and finding your site is a great inspiration that, God Willing, will help me with learning to capture better photos. Great job on surviving the Dig Effect!
Thanks for the kind words.
Crazy, what about phtography of Flogger.tv?
http://www.flogger.tv
How much percentaje is in there?
The Digg effect is madness. Although the idea of massive traffic sounds appealing, in actual fact, most websites aren't prepared for the influx of untargetted visitors, servers crash, and the traffic soons starts declining. Hopefully in that time, the site gets a number of visitors that will become repeat visitors.
The best effect of Digg and other sites like it, is that you get an increase in the number of links, which hopefully will result in long term benefits.
Nevertheless, I've just spent some time looking at your pictures, and they are magnificent.
Congrats from one of your readers prior to the Digg boom :) I too enjoy your photos and development techniques. I aspire to this level of quality in my photos and seeing yours reminds me to get out and try.
I would definitely come around even when the "digg effect" is in the past :) Wonderful photos and content here.
Congratulations on being dugg. The statistics were very interesting. I've enjoyed seeing interest in your photos and site grow, and of course I've enjoyed your photos as well.
Just wondering, where do you host your site? Is it on dedicated server?.. I've also had a digg effect to my site couple of weeks ago which made my database crashed and got my account suspended...
I host with AIT (Advanced Internet Technology). I do not have a dedicated server, I have their 'Reseller 1' account. It does have unlimited bandwidth. One thing that helped, is my site is not hosting the images (they are on Flickr), so we were pretty much just serving up the HTML.
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