Digg traffic was disappointing...

[mustardseed]

About a week ago I had a Digg submission (promoting Aveyond through an affiliate link) of mine hit the front page. I got a staggering number of clickthroughs but very few purchases.

Some of that may have been due to Amanda's site going down for a little while I suppose or digg users could just be cheap. :)

[BinaryMoon]

It's actually quite well known amongst web developers and seo's that digg users rarely buy anything. The value of digg comes from the inbound links that you generate rather than the vast amount of hits.

[soniCron]

You were spamming.
The comments indicate the site went down shortly after it front-paged.
You were spamming.
It's uncool to submit someone's business server to such a pounding without a warning.
You were spamming.


If you must do such a slimy thing and share it with us, at least make sure the stats are correct. All you've measured are the number of people hitting the Plimus redirection page and the number of affiliate sales. It's entirely feasable that Plimus continued redirecting, but Amanda's server couldn't handle the load. And so, few people actually got to download the game.

What would be a real service is to compare your redirection logs with Amanda's server logs to see how many of those redirections resulted in a successful download. Then share them with us.

To redeem yourself.

Spammer.

[mustardseed]

Yes, it was naive and ignorant of me to redirect to her server without warning, and I did apologize to her when I saw what was happening. She said it was okay and very nice about it.

I felt it would've been more rude had I not directed it to the original author of the game though. i.e blogspam

Sorry I offended you soniCron. :o

[soniCron]

I'm not offended. Just disappointed.

[Davaris]

It's actually quite well known amongst web developers and seo's that digg users rarely buy anything. The value of digg comes from the inbound links that you generate rather than the vast amount of hits.

So its just useful SEO then?

[soniCron]

And ad hits.

[arcadetown]

Digg and other sites are untargeted traffic thus conversions will be lower. But any traffic and sales is better than none right? Well except maybe worthless Chinese, Russian, etc. traffic.

Not sure how it's rude to generate traffic to someone's site. The lesson here is don't skimp when it comes to your servers. Expect big spikes and make them your friend, not your enemy. You'll never know if/when some huge site might link to you. It's happened countless times here.

[DrWilloughby]

The lesson here is don't skimp when it comes to your servers. Expect big spikes and make them your friend, not your enemy. You'll never know if/when some huge site might link to you. It's happened countless times here.

I'm hoping to have this happen to my site soon... though I'm actually not sure what I can do to ensure my server stays up. I'm on a shared server on GoDaddy, should I go dedicated before I release? Anyone know what I can do to prepare for a big spike?

[soniCron]

Check out these articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
http://blog.webfaction.com/handling-the-digg-effect-on-a-standard-shared-hosting-account
http://blog.tarotoast.com/2006/03/19/233/
http://devnulled.com/content/2005/07/surviving-a-slashdotting-with-a-celeron-466-my-slashdot-experience/
http://blogs.tech-recipes.com/davak/2005/11/06/digg-effect-the-top-10-things-webmasters-should-know/

All that said, Go Daddy severly overloads their servers. You'll need to find a better host, and ultimately a dedicated server.

[dozer]

What kina spamming was used?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming

[soniCron]

The pedantic kind.

[Matthew]

Calling this spammy is just silly. For the sake of anyone who didn't look it up on Digg, this is the story:

Girl creates Hardcore SNES-style RPG for the PC!

Created by Amanda Fae, "Aveyond" is a classic RPG in every aspect. Awesome pixel art, great music, and a promised 50 hours of old-school gameplay! One of the best Indie Games ever!

The link goes to an authorized affiliate point of sale, obviously. But what's wrong with that? Isn't that the point of affiliation? I see affiliation as a way to encourage other people to do marketing and promotion on your behalf, doing things that you don't have time or energy to do yourself. This is a perfect example of that; Amanda herself never took advantage of Digg (and it's a lot harder to write a Digg-friendly story than many people realize). To call it "slimy" seems to disrespect the value an affiliate can bring to the table.

And back on topic: I've had my list of physics games (http://www.fun-motion.com/list-of-physics-games/) on the front page of Digg before. I don't have many metrics on the sites for tracking things, although the AdSense account is a good global indicator. It did see a very severe drop in CTR--Digg users are very fickle, technically savvy, and seem to be looking for a quick distraction. I doubt they'd buy much of anything. They're just there to see what all the fuss is about and then they zip off to the next story.

[soniCron]

All opinions aside, commercial postings on Digg (and many other social linking sites) are strongly discouraged and frowned upon. I say respect the community and try not to muck it up with self-serving posts.

Regardless, I love your site, Matthew, and it was a pleasure to see Digg's own Kevin Rose submit it! Congrats! :)

[Bad Sector]

I somewhat agree with soniCron. If you're going to write a digg story, write for the sake of making people aware of what you're talking about. The above story should link to Amanda's site.

I suppose that this is done for the good of the indie game developers as a whole. I'm participating in this digg thing to make indie games known, not to serve only myself (and actually currently there is nothing for me to be served - although i have two games in my site, they're both free and i'm not gaining anything from them).

[Leon]

About a week ago I had a Digg submission (promoting Aveyond through an affiliate link) of mine hit the front page. I got a staggering number of clickthroughs but very few purchases.

Some of that may have been due to Amanda's site going down for a little while I suppose or digg users could just be cheap. :)

From what I recall from the Comment thread, most people were mainly discussing two things: One, they hated the fact that it was an affiliate link and Two, they thought the story was exploiting and making it seem like one woman made the game totally alone.

I haven't been a member of Digg along enough to get a real feel for the community, but it seems they were really put off by the Affiliate link(Although I think the second thing they were talking about was stupid to argue about).

Then again, as put off as they were, over a thousand people dugg the article. I'd still take those numbers over nothing. Do you have a mailing list? If so, did you get any people to sign up?

[Leon]

The link goes to an authorized affiliate point of sale, obviously. But what's wrong with that?

Looking through the Terms of Service, it's apparently against Digg's rules to submit Affiliate links. Interesting that they haven't removed it though. Not like it's gotten six diggs and just didn't get noticed.

7.to submit stories or comments linking to affiliate programs, multi-level marketing schemes, sites/blogs repurposing existing stories (source hops), or off-topic content;

[amaranth]

My poor IT guy didn't know what was going on. It did convince me to upgrade my server. Things are getting really busy, and a business should be able to handle something like that. (Brian, you would be proud.)

All of those poor guys... I think a lot of them saw female, hardcore, and RPG, and they just had to visit the site. And then, drats! Foiled by a cute little anime game!

For click-through purchases, I think BinaryMoon is right. It's all about the target audience. Wrong audience = few sales. If you throw 1000 vegetarians a steak, no one is going to bite. :)

[Matthew]

Looking through the Terms of Service, it's apparently against Digg's rules to submit Affiliate links. Interesting that they haven't removed it though. Not like it's gotten six diggs and just didn't get noticed.

Interesting--although to my mind they're talking about linking to your own affiliate programs/MLM schemes/etc (soliciting people to join your program, not using an affiliate link on something else). I see the concern, though. I'm wary of man-in-the-middle and astroturf marketing myself. Still, I don't think it does any harm in a situation like this. The actual story text highlights Amanda and the game; the only "bad" thing is the affiliate code. I think it's a fair trade.

I have heard stories of blackhat SEOs and the like earning $400 in a single spike of Digg traffic. I'm honestly not sure how, though. Fun-Motion had 80,000 pageviews after being Dugg, which resulted in $39.44 from AdSense clicks (the typical day is about $8 from 6k views).

[terin]

Yeah well if I throw 1,000 vegetarians at steaks I will simply promote it and charge people 10 dollars a seat to watch it happen.

The moral: There's money to be made doing anything, including Digg hits- you just have to be ready for it. It may not be, pound for pound, as much money as true organic traffic would bring... but money is still money. It is still fame, popularity, and a very mild % retention of traffic.

And I back Brian in saying: If you plan on being popular (as Amanada is now becoming) you should be ready for anything. A few weeks ago we saw three HUGE foreign sites link to us for no apparent reason and all on the same day. It even had US sweating bullets about the server - and we upgraded a couple months ago! Don't skimp on the servers :)

-Joe

[Mike Wiering]

The moral: There's money to be made doing anything, including Digg hits- you just have to be ready for it. It may not be, pound for pound, as much money as true organic traffic would bring... but money is still money. It is still fame, popularity, and a very mild % retention of traffic.
I'm still trying to think of a good use of the huge amount of traffic I get from a site in Taiwan: almost 40% of the hits come from that site directly linking to my game Super Worms (over 13,000 downloads so far this month). The game is very small (only 85Kb) so the data traffic isn't really a problem, but not a single sale to Taiwan in the past 2 years. Maybe I should make the game open a browser with a page full of ads...

[arcadetown]

Trick is your general advertising networks don't want those users either. Perhaps there's niche asian targeted advertisers that can geoip those adverts for?

I see the future... Joe starting the "vegetarian steak company". Why not, there's veggie burgers :rolleyes:

[terin]

Here's a tip Mike:

The Taiwanese traffic is HOPEFULLY heavily influencing your Alexa and traffic stats. Use that to find new partners with whom you can trade large volumes of foreign traffic for smaller or equal volumes of ... more valuable traffic :)

-Joe