The Dollar Factory

Can you monetize Digg traffic?

Getting your stories on the front page of Digg and other similar social news sites is frequently referred to as the surefire way to get your website noticed. The momentary surge in traffic that a website could receive if it makes it to Digg’s front page has been known to bring down poorly designed or hosted websites; this phenomenon is known as the “Digg effect” and it is similar to the well known “Slashdot effect.” Many people lose a lot of sleep trying to get one of their articles to Digg’s front page. Everyone knows that the more traffic your site gets the more money you will make. Is Digg traffic the kind of traffic that you can monetize making your efforts to earn Digg popularity worth it? The answer to this question might actually surprise you.

First of all, how much traffic can Digg drive to your site? The Dollar Factory has not been on Digg yet so I don’t have my own statistics to present. However, some bloggers have posted server logs about the amount of traffic they received once listed on Digg’s front page. It would appear that the number of visitors ranges from 20,000 to 50,000 with the number of page views varying from 70,000 to 100,000. To tell you the truth, I was a bit surprised by these numbers because I honestly was expecting much larger numbers considering Digg’s notoriety for bringing down websites. This amount of traffic can easily bring down a poorly designed website merely because of the large number of requests in a small period of time. In a future article I will discuss how you can design your website to survive the Digg effect but for now let’s see if it is possible to monetize this traffic.

To monetize any kind of traffic to your site, you must first understand its demographic composition. Social news sites such as Digg, Slashdot and reddit are frequented by young techies, teenagers and college kids. If you don’t believe me then you should look at the promoted stories on these sites clearly catering to a young techie audience. Some bloggers who have tracked the browsers used by Digg traffic, report that the majority prefers the open source Firefox. It turns out that this last fact is actually rather important when it comes to monetizing this traffic which is what I will talk about next.

If your primary source of revenue is affiliate programs then the answer to the question posed earlier in this article is a straightforward “no.” Digg visitors are only interested in reading the story linked to via Digg’s front page and they are not coming to your site to purchase anything. In fact, using Digg to try and sell your affiliate products is frowned upon and chances are that if this is the ultimate goal of your article then you are not going to get more than a couple of Diggs to begin with.

The second and most popular method for monetizing a site is the well known pay per click (PPC) ads of Google’s AdSense or other similar programs such as Adbrite and Text-Link-Ads. Let’s focus on AdSense since it is the best converting and highest paying program available. First of all, according to Google’s Terms of Service (TOS) I am not allowed to give details about AdSense revenue and so I won’t. In addition, I do not host AdSense on this site and I haven’t been Dugg yet so I don’t have my own data to present. However, common sense and reports from bloggers that have been Dugg paint a very clear picture of what you can expect. Like a said earlier, the Digg demographic is dominated by a young techie crowd with a fondness towards Firefox. Digg users are well known not to click on AdSense ads. Diggers have trained themselves to ignore ads and in addition, they often use a Firefox plugin called Adblock. The sole purpose of Adblock is to prevent the showing of ads and it is very effective. In other words, out of those 50,000 visitors very few will actually see your ads and even fewer will actually click on one. Webmasters report that click through rates (CTRs) for Digg traffic are nearly zero.

To further add to a webmaster’s woes, Digg traffic can not only bring down a good site turning away regular visitors but it might actually end up costing you money. If the object linked to from Digg happens to be a large image file or an mp3 or a movie then it won’t be more that a couple of hours before your month’s bandwidth is exhausted. This means that your site could potentially be down for the rest of the month unless you are willing to pay for additional bandwidth. That’s money out of your pocket.

In conclusion, getting your website on Digg’s front page is not the money maker people expect it to be. I find that spending too much time worrying about how to get on Digg’s front page is a waste of time. You should spend this time adding good content to your site, optimizing it for the search engines and looking after your regular visitors. There is something you can do with Digg traffic but it has nothing to do with making money fast. I will discuss in a future article how to better handle this traffic to potentially generate your site’s revenues in the long term.