Everyone knows that the digg effect is very strong, bringing down websites. What amazing is not just the actual traffic that one gets directly from digg, which is a large amount, but the popularity and publicity that comes from being digged, pushing up in traffic charts everywhere. This is not about the charts or load that I got from digg, but from the effect that that has had in my site.
The digg effect pushed me up in my country’s blog chart, putting me in the 9th most visited blog in the last two weeks, and giving me the top visited post of the whole continent. Not only that, but I showed up on the frontpage of the Peruvian blogs’ site, something that had never happened to me.
The actual traffic was staggering. While I was on the frontpage, the traffic went from 68 at 3 pm, to 1,700 at 4 pm to 5,246 one hour later, at 5. It then went gradually down to 3,221 at 6 pm, at then stabilised at 7, when it was at 1779. It stayed in the 1000-2000 range for a couple of hours. At 5 am of today, sixth of October, it went to its lowest, which is something to be expected since everyone is asleep. It appears to now be going up again, as I’m now on LinuxToday.
The traffic source has also changed substancially. After going off the frontpage of digg, the percentage of traffic from digg has gone down, from being 80% of my total traffic to being 40%, as the direct links from other pages go up. This doesn’t only come from the fact that I’m not the at the frontpage anymore, but also is helped by the fact that I’ve been linked by many blogs, as shown here on Technorati.
My feed’s subscribers number has skyrocketed. Right now, I have 1,202 subscribers, of which 87% use Firefox Live Bookmarks. Amazingly, 67 people use Flock to subscribe to the feed. However, I think that will go down in recent days, as people realise I am not as cool as they think I am.
The best part of having been digged wasn’t the traffic, but the popularity. One of my old articles on Epiphany was added to LinuxToday, something I would never have thought possible before. I was even link from a Reuters Blog. Now, I only need to be linked from a blog I have on my RSS reader to be really amazed about how digg really puts you out there.
