A trip to the top of Digg’s homepage can mean 50,000+ visits in a very short time frame. The "Digg Effect" is a welcome and yet sometimes mixed blessing, since the surge in traffic is often enough to cripple servers. And, after all is said and done, it may not result in any additional ad coin whatsoever.
Developer Yong Fook experienced the phenomenon recently and wrote up an account of the fiscal effects. Though he received an increase of over 50 times the traffic, his site revenue, based on Amazon affiliate links, stayed the same.
Fook says his site is not meant to generate ad income. However, with a prime spot for the ads he does run, one would expect some increase. Yet the Digg Effect is known to bring users who tend not to click. Fook laments not having cost-per-click ads to test the theory, though others have shown the minimal additional revenue is often less than the cost of additional bandwidth.
Sites that run ads on cost-per-impression (CPM) basis would undoubtedly see a linear increase in revenue with more traffic. If Digg traffic became a mainstay of the site, however, the CPM might decrease, assuming advertisers want clicks.
Of course, there can be overarchingly positive aspects of receiving a flood of Digg traffic. If you have a compelling site, these new visitors will want to hear more from you. Digg users love to read fresh, quality content. Some have reported about 500 new blog subscribers, for example.
And Fook argues that all the attention may be motivating — though not necessarily for the right reason:
(For the record, Fook’s article has 11 Diggs at this writing …)
Fook himself saw a 200% increase of interest in his latest project, Gumtrail. Ironically, it’s a tool to measures user engagement with a website.
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