The Digg Effect: An In-Depth Analysis
Between 11:00AM and 12:00PM on July 3rd, my drive tweak article made the front page of digg.com. In this follow-up article I will cover some of the data I gathered from Site Meter and AdSense during my article's short fame.
Traffic
First, the most important issue is traffic. Traffic initially peaked at slightly over 5,000 visitors per hour when the article first hit the front page, and for the next 18 hours it slowly diminished. It's a good thing I don't host my sites on a Commodore 64 anymore, because it would have crapped out. By Tuesday morning at around 5:00AM, the traffic had dropped to a low of about 400 visitors per hour. Then it started to climb again, and as I'm writing this article, the traffic remains up at about 475 visitors per hour. The total traffic from the article so far is about 36,000 visitors.
Browsers
Next I'll look at the browser wars. Well, not much of a war here, as Firefox clearly whoops Internet Explorer with a share of 59%. Firefox is definitely more popular among the savvy digg.com reader base than the public. Damn it uses a lot of memory though, with mine currently at about 150MB of RAM.
Operating Systems
I was a little more disappointed with the OS distribution, with Windows pulling in about 90%. Having such a nerdy Firefox-obsessed audience, I was disappointed that I didn't see more people running Linux or even Mac OS. It must be the fact that Windows is so much more user-friendly and reliable than the other two, especially with the new and magnificant Windows Genuine Advantage. My toilet paper also has the genuine advantage.
Screen Resolutions
Who the heck has a 3200x1200 screen resolution? Drewl. Get me one of those (or maybe it's two side-by-side). As far as resolutions go, it looks like 1024x768 and 1280x1024 prevail. Most web design guidelines I read say to design for 800x600 resolution, but maybe they are outdated. Therefore, my New Year's resolution is 1024x768 (haha).
Digg.com
Well, my article was the most popular digg of the day for a couple hours. Then Windows Genuine Advantage reared its ugly head in a story about its own demise. The story about the evil program concocted by Microsoft that protects us from ourselves, destroying lives and killing babies, wrought more diggs than my own story. So, my story ended up in second place for the day. Now, I will forever remember this injustice every time I spitefully click on the WGA notice that my copy of Windows may not be genuine.
On a more cheerful note, I submitted my story to Slashdot, and their omnipotent editors rejected it. It's a good thing too, because judging from the article's popularity on digg.com and del.icio.us, Slashdot readers would have hated it. I wasn't sad though because digg is more popular than Slashdot.
Money
Next, let's talk about money. I would post a screenshot of my Google AdSense account, but they strictly forbid it. My site has so far earned around $45 total ad revenue from the 36,000 visitors mentioned above. That's not bad, but it's not even close to the goal I set of $100 billion (Dr. Evil laugh). However, my site is still pulling in about 475 hits per hour, earning around $14 a day, so I should hit $100 billion (Dr. Evil laugh) in about... 19.5 million years.
If you have a blog and you haven't set up Google Adsense yet, I strongly suggest you do. Even if you do have it set up already, here are some tips I have found very helpful:
- Make your ads blend in with your page. If you set them off with borders, colors, or anything that makes them too distinct from your content, people will mentally block them out. Here are some excellent case studies from Google's AdSense Help Center on how to set up your ads.
- Don't click on your own ads, don't tell people to click on your ads, and don't put anything on your page that suggests to click on your ads. This is a very big no-no, and it's unethical.
- If you aren't ready to use a paid blogging service, use eBlogger. Since it's owned by Google and they make money if you use AdSense, there are no other ads on your pages competing with yours.
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