Thoughtful post by Brian over at Performancing on 3 Reasons Why Delicious Bookmarks Beat Digg Traffic Hands Down.
I have to say I’d never really given it much thought before – but Brian makes some good points.
I guess I’d take a link on the popular page of either one. I find that Digg leads to a lot more secondary link ups which is useful after that initial rush of traffic – but apart from that I think Brian makes some good points.
What do you think?
I mostly try to write blogs with a person in mind. My ideal reader is a person who is some what informed about the things that I write about. I always try to write in a way so that I can entertain and educate the person at the sametime. I do at times make the mistake of writing for the masses, but most of the times I stay grounded.
I’m rather biased in that I’m a regular user of del.icio.us, and I never put links in Digg. The reason I’d go with del.icio.us is because the folks that would get you on the popular page have already been on your site, and deemed it worthy of a link. Digg sort of herds people in a direction. The del.icio.us folks would already know about this site, while the diggers could be seeing it for the first and last time.
As far as link and sign-ups, I’m thinking they’d be about the same. Like I said, the del.icio.us folks are more likely to already be subscribers.
And, I’m of the opinion that as soon as I create something worthy of being on the front page at Digg or Reddit or del.icio.us, I’ll get there about the same time in all of them, since there’s a lot of commonality between the services.
I have noticed that if a story makes it to the front page of Digg that del.icio.us bookmarks soon follow.
Digg users are far more likely to have ad-blocking enabled. The one day I got traffic from digg I had more page views than ad-impressions (2 ads per page). The publicity is certainly worth it of course..
I’ve noticed both digg and del.icio.us traffic bring next to no revenue to my sites.
My opinion to why this is so is people who use digg and del.icio.us are a little more “computer savvy” and have learned to not click on most ads because so many “bad ads” brought them to malware. They get a bad case of ad blindness after being burned a few times.
I too have received a Digg (1500 votes or so). Like others, there was next to no increase in AdSense revenue despite many thousands of additional pageviews and a seemingly good number of comments. I did notice a big, but short-lived bump in feed suscribers, but I think that was because FeedBurner was confused.
I’ve yet to be blessed with traffic from Delicious so I can’t compare the two.
I think any prominent link from a social bookmarking site is valuable. I’ve had a couple of stories dugg, and several stories have made it to the top of del.icio.us. I’ve also had traffic from other similar sites.
There’s no question that Digg brings the greatest surge of traffic. Twenty or thirty thousand hits in a day is typical. But I’m not convinced that Digg traffic provides any lasting value. Few Digg users subscribe to my content, and few become regular readers.
Traffic from del.icio.us, however, is more valuable. My impression is that a greater number of del.icio.us users have sites of their own, and they’re more likely to drive secondary traffic to my content. Something featured at del.icio.us is also more likely to get picked up at, say, Lifehacker or a similar site than something from Digg.
But it’s all good. My goal is to provide quality content that leads to a solid, growing readership. I figure everything else is secondary to that.
“Better” means something different to each blogger. I wrote “How to explain RSS the Oprah way” and got flooded because of front page landing on Digg and most popular list on Delicious.
My blog is basically a women’s magazine with a tech section. Loads of traffic is great, but the users of D & D are mostly techie males who aren’t going to subscribe to a blog about skinny jeans. And, I too, did not get a spike in ad revenue relative to the amount of traffic, again because my ads are about beauty and fashion, something D&D users don’t really care about.
What was better though was the secondary exposure of my blog to more mainstream outlets through the D &D exposure to readers who fit more of my audience. All techie guys have girlfriends, wives, moms, sisters, etc. and there are plenty of other news outlets who cater to a tech laymen’s audience.
They get a bad case of ad blindness after being burned a few times. http://www.chinastone-export.com/www/
yach I already use del icious and digg, I think digg follow more power than del ici