Stats: How Much Traffic Does a Digg Send?
Glen / 
13 Comments / 
December 19th, 2008 / 
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I’m in a statistical mood once again so this time I thought I would take a look to see if there is any correlation between the number of Digg’s a story gets to how many visitors it sends. I’ve taken one of our Social Media clients and analysed 15 of their stories that made the Digg front page.
These are stories that remained on the full page, in other words they didn’t get buried, and I’ve taken a look at all international traffic that Digg sent.
When I first came up with this idea, I definitely thought that there would be a strong correlation between the number of Diggs received and the amount of traffic the site sends. This would particularly be the case when a story gets enough Diggs to make the ‘Top 10′ stories of the day which are constantly featured on the right hand side of the newspaper.
So, what do you think: Can you get a decent estimate for how many visitors you would receive for X number of Diggs? Let’s find out shall we…
The Data
Below is a table of the 15 stories that I analysed, the number of Diggs each of the stories received and the number of hits sent from Digg.
| Article No. | Diggs | Traffic |
| 1 | 2,730 | 136,067 |
| 2 | 2,166 | 76,562 |
| 3 | 1,820 | 29,206 |
| 4 | 1,238 | 22,072 |
| 5 | 1,168 | 25,796 |
| 6 | 974 | 32,667 |
| 7 | 924 | 10,898 |
| 8 | 856 | 22,285 |
| 9 | 761 | 9,135 |
| 10 | 744 | 28,417 |
| 11 | 616 | 11,212 |
| 12 | 605 | 7,376 |
| 13 | 585 | 13,565 |
| 14 | 480 | 5,952 |
| 15 | 261 | 6,207 |
And for those of you who prefer graphs to look at, here’s one of the above data:
Analysis
As you can see from the graph, there is a clear correlation between the number of Diggs a story gets and the amount of traffic that is sent. As I stated earlier, I think the reason stories with a lot of Diggs (1000+) get much more traffic is because they get featured on the ‘Top 10 Stories of Today’ which is constantly featured on the right hand side of the Digg homepage.
In total: 15,928 Diggs sent 437,417 visitors to a site we are working on, that is an average of 27 visitors per Digg. Of course, 27 visitors per Digg is based on you getting enough Diggs to make the homepage of the site.
Based on that stat, we can predict how many visitors you could receive if you reached a certain number of Diggs on one of your stories. I’ve outlined some of these predictions below:
| Diggs | Predicted Traffic |
| 100 | 2,700 |
| 250 | 6,750 |
| 500 | 13,500 |
| 1,000 | 27,000 |
| 2,000 | 54,000 |
Apart from what the stats are telling us, I hope this data is even useful to those who are wondering how much traffic Digg still sends these days.
What Affects the Data
Of course, I knew I would never be able to make a completely accurate idea of how many Diggs will send how much traffic to a page. Factors that contribute to varying results include:
- Time of day the story goes popular
- Whether it makes it into Top 10 Most Dugg of the Day
- How many people are using Digg at the time
- A small(ish) sample, if I had 100 stories to work with the results might look different…
…and any other factors that may obviously influence different results. On the whole though, the figures I’ve presented (27 visitors to every Digg, providing the story makes the homepage) should be fairly accurate.
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Very informative analysis. The direct co-relation between no. of diggs and traffic is probably due to one more fact. More diggs spreads the submitted story in much larger network of diggers, where budding diggers help spread it further. Of course, the sidebar factor outweighs all others.
Thanks Rajeev. Yes, the sidebar definitely has an impact on visitors.
I’m glad to know that putting time into sites like Digg might one day increase traffic to my site.
Question: Do you have any data on whether your Digg traffic translates to RSS subscribers?
Hi Sarah, there’s definitely a lot of potential with Digg. I don’t have any data on turning them into subscribers, but on StumbleUpon i’ve noticed a trend where a lot of them are subscribing to our feed. I think Digg is less likely to bring many feed subscribers.
The irony of this is that by the time you are “big” enough to hit Digg home page the traffic they send will be a little insignificant compared to your own :-). How often do you see anyone “small” on the Digg front page?
Thanks Glen, good analysis!
What is the “sidebar factor”?
If you look at the Digg homepage, on the right hand side, you will see there is a list of the ‘Most Dugg stories today’.
So, usually a story might be on the homepage for an hour, but if you get enough Digg’s to make the top 10 most dugg then you can get homepage exposure for the whole day, thus resulting in a lot more traffic.
Hope that makes sense Kevin, thanks for the comment.
thanks, got it. does a story only stay on digg for 1 day? is it literally 24 hours then it gets deleted?
It doesn’t get deleted, but it starts to get hidden in the queue.
Once you submit a story to Digg, you generally have around 24 hours to make the homepage or your story will fall of upcoming lists and won’t be able to make it. There have been some rare exceptions but they are very rare.
Once your story is on the homepage, it tends to get exposure for around an hour or 2, depending on how many new stories are added.
I hope that helps
Cheers,
Glen
Hey bro !
Good data.. You know your stuff
Will be sure to keep checking back for your updates
Thanks
Dean
http://www.DeanHolland.com
Oh my, that is a nice traffic, you must have been submitting a great articles that many people will ever share to other Digger and Digging your post to stay on top at main pages. Congratulations
This is a very good post, I have begun to use digg for website promotion and let me tell you that I get about 3 hits on my site per digg (this is on the lower end, less than 100 diggs)