It was a good Christmas eve for me, with one of my posts hitting the front page and getting 700+ diggs. This is an expression of my thoughts about the digg and related issues. This site is hosted on Dreamhost, which ’supposedly’ buckles under the pressure of a Digg and the site goes offline. I have more to say on this, read on.
The post
Warning: Bragging ahead 
The post was Top 40+ GIMP plugins, dugg here. It got 900+ diggs, and received over 25,000 hits in a day. The traffic was in an unfamiliar pattern. Usually, a story gets picked on Digg, then on Stumble Upon and Del.icio.us.
However, in my case, SU was the first. Many of the incoming visitors dugg the story (I had a ‘Digg this’ link in the beginning and end of the post), and the story was up on the Digg Hot Topics section. From then on, the progress was slow untill 50 diggs (when it became popular), and then rocketed to 500+ diggs in less than 6 hours.
Then, Del.icio.us users picked it up, and it was on Del.icio.us popular page too. As of now, 1744 persons have bookmarked it on Del.icio.us.
The reason for the Digg number was rightly pointed out in a comment by gary4gar:
670 diggs,
Opensource at its best:)
Traffic: sources and characteristics
Looking back at my stats, I see that the vast majority of hits have come from Digg. However, unusually, SU has given its fair share too. Del.icio.us disappointed me, to say the least.
I had thought of publishing the stat images and graphs, but unfortunately, they are fragmented in my Statcounter and Google Analytics accounts. Statcounter contains the total number of hits, but they offer limited stats. I am switching to Mint next month, anyway. These might make some sense when viewed together:
Over 60% of the traffic from social media sites was contributed by Digg (no surprises there), but surprisingly, over 30% was from Stumble Upon. I’m starting to love SU as much as Digg!
Subscription numbers
I had read that most Diggs would not bring any loyal traffic, and that it would be just a blitzkreig of visitors for a day. However, I find this disturbing, because I gained 95 subscribers on the day.
How many of the new subscribers will stick around is anybody’s guess, though.
To make things easier, you might want to subscribe to my feed, if you haven’t done so already.
Hosting problems (or lack thereof)
Dreamhost is often blamed as being a slow, unreliable host that goes down in case of a digg. However, I have also noticed that some blogs stay online during diggs. Analyzing my own digg, I can say two things:
- The problem of site being taken down depends on which server you are in, whether your neighbours inside the server is experiencing similar rise in traffic, and the number of blogs hosted in the server. In short, if you are lucky enough, you can survive without any precaution measures.
- Optimisation is important, and there are many methods to do so. I have discussed some tips below.
Optimization techniques
The site did not go down at any point, and is a testimony to three things – the myth about Dreamhost, and the effectiveness of WP Super Cache plugin and my little optimization techniques.
I had deployed the Super Cache plugin with the lockdown setting enabled, which explains why your comments do not appear immediately. This reduced the CPU usage greatly. Usually, Dreamhost suspends accounts due to CPU usage, which did not happen to me.
The design of this site contains only a handful of images, thereby reducing both bandwidth usage, and more importantly, the number of HTTP requests. Reducing the HTTP requests is crucial, so I recommend that you use a theme with few images if you get dugg frequently.
A shout goes out to Tonnet, who submitted the post to Digg, SU, Del.icio.us and other countless social media sites. I would also like to thank my good friends Shankar and Mayank for their support during the digg.
Final thoughts
I see many bloggers lambasting digg in many ways, claiming that the time, effort and resources consumed cannot justify the end result. I say that it depends on your end result. In my case, it was certainly worth it, and I might write more such resource posts.
However, seeing how many readers frustrated at such posts in blogs, I would like to ask you this question: do you like such long posts, or would you rather that I published them as pages (thereby removing them out of the post hierarchy and feed)?
Update: Lifehacker has linked to the GIMP plugins post! It has appeared on the Australian version of Lifehacker too.
Update #2: Feed subscription numbers have fallen rapidly, and as Benedict comments below, this might be caused by browsers which act as feed readers (who stomped this blog on the day of the Digg.
Update #3: I have written top ways for a Digg-worthy blog post, so check it out!
Related reading
- Analyzing WordPress admin dashboard UI design
- How to get the new features on Stumble Upon?
- How to prevent Stumble Upon from bookmarking your liked pages
- How DiggBar could potentially replace Stumble Upon for many users
Great analysis there. You were really fortunate that your site didn’t go down, and yes you’ve done the things you should do when you’re on Digg.
Did you look at the bounce rate and average time spent on blog? I’m sure Digg users stay for the least time
Well, I don’t think you should make such articles as pages and take it out of RSS. I’d love to see such posts and be able to bookmark/read/comment on them, so don’t put them out as pages
And I also noticed a Firefox Referral link when I opened your site in IE once, did that bring you any money? At least, a little?
@Shankar: Thanks. Yes, fortunate is an understatement. But I remember Arpit Jacob surviving digg too.
Bounce rate is over 70%, and time spent is less than 1 minute – for such a long list post. I guess I should keep these posts as posts after all. The ref link is just my bit to make others switch over to FF -besides, my site has problems with IE 6/7.
That’s a nice demonstration of what wp-super-cache can do! Did you know the gimp-lomo plugin you had listed on that page was hosted on one of my blogs too?
In the long term, you’ll see a lot more traffic from SU.
WOW!
I like to see spikes
Congrats…
Sumesh, your work deserved a digg and stumble and no doubt in that! And when it comes to RSS subscribers count, the increase in numbers wont really stay there for a while. That might be due to the fact certain browsers report them self as feed reader instead of browser! In you’re case also the next day subscriber count has reduced much far after the digg effect day. However, it has leaded you around 20+ new subscribers; which is really good. The tendency of subscription can be more felt with StumbleUpon users rather than digg users.
@Donncha: Yes, that was some demonstration, and I, on behalf of the WP community, have to thank you! And you’re correct about SU – more traffic at a slower rate.
@Techdune: Thanks.
@Benedict: Your words sure ring true! The numbers have dropped further, but even 20 new is good enough.
Nice breakdown buddy. I’m sure you’ll get more stumbles coming your way.