I Digg It - Getting 35,000+ page views in a week

(Pssst, there’s a part 2 to this article)

There’s some unwritten law of the Internet that after getting to the front page of Digg, you have to post the traffic stats or a band of unruly trunk monkeys will beat you down and make bongos out of your asscheeks.

Contrary to popular belief, I do not want that to happen. Here is my lame-ass traffic analysis based on the referrer logs that wordpress.com provides. I’ll post the original logs and the perl script at a later date.

Before this huge spike in traffic I was averaging around 1100-1200 views a day. The highest day of the spike was around 17,000 views. I’m sitting at around 3,000 views a day but I expect that to drop and average out at 1400-1500 a day.

scheduleworld_dugg.gif

It’s kind of funny that I was excited at 50,000 hits for my blog the day before this happened. I’ve gotten 37,000 hits in the since then in the week that passed. There’s been another big jump in my Technorati ranking, it’s stablized to around 19,000 at the moment. For a brief moment it was at 12,000 and articles I commented on were appearing on the front of TechMeme, which was good for traffic as well. So this must be what it feels like to be an Blogosphere A-lister, if only for a moment.

technorati_rank_2006_09.png

Here’s a breakdown of the numbers, followed by a complete list of the referrer URLs. I even through together some really ugly GD::Graph graphs for everyone to mock. I can make pretty pictures with Gliffy, but GD::Graph escapes me grasphs.

Look at me, I’m being punny on the Internet. Don’t you wish I wasn’t an anonymous blogger so you could hunt me down and give me the beating I so richly deserve?

You can see the cascade effect nicely of getting picked up by lifehack.org, then del.icio.us, then lifehacker.com and finally digg.com. What’s of real interest is comparing the stumbleupon and furl numbers versus digg. That prompted this inflamatory rant that I’d been wanting to write for a while because I wanted to use the term “Web Too.Many”.

One interesting side effect I’ve noticed is that an unrelated post that already was in the top three Google search results for a *lot* of terms doubled in traffic. So it looks like my Google rating has gone up from all the incoming links.

The Numbers

Site Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Totals
normal traffic to article 59 89 144 115 594 388 210 1599
other articles 10 28 0 0 6 33 180 257
lifehack.org 0 140 82 83 116 26 11 458
del.icio.us 0 0 762 91 535 173 17 1578
diggdot.us 0 0 127 0 0 0 0 127
popurls.com 0 0 244 58 302 122 0 726
blog links 0 0 0 0 6 94 81 181
digg.com 0 0 0 0 1648 1934 119 3701
lifehacker.com 0 0 0 0 761 712 144 1617
stumbleupon.com 0 0 0 0 28 27 13 68
furl.net 0 0 0 0 0 22 0 22
techmeme.com 0 0 0 0 0 149 7 156


I’m not entirely sure how wordpress.com calculates the stats, but I’m assuming that referrers are the number of unique visitors coming in from that link, whereas the 37,000 comes from page views where one user can generate multiple views.

Intermission

The Referrers

normal traffic to article
other articles
lifehack.org
del.icio.us
diggdot.us
popurls.com
blog links
digg.com
lifehacker.com
stumbleupon.com
furl.net
techmeme.com

The Images

The top traffic sites:

scheduleworld_dugg_high.png
The want-to-be top traffic sites:

scheduleworld_dugg_low.png

I wonder if sites still get dugg for posting about how they got dugg?

Related Posts

diggsm.gif Digg | delicioussm.gif Del.icio.us | blinklistsm.gif BlinkList | furlsm.gif Furl
spurlsm.gif Spurl | redditsm.gif Reddit | simpysm.png Simpy | rawsugar.jpg RawSugar

This entry was written by engtech, posted on September 22, 2006 at , filed under Digg, Statistics and Navel Gazing, Technology. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Comments are closed, but you can leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

5 Comments

  1. Mike
    Posted September 22, 2006 at | Permalink

    *sniff* blogs… the good ones blow up so fast.

  2. A.J. Valliant
    Posted September 22, 2006 at | Permalink

    I got a million posts on my blog yesterday but it made the server crash, destroying all records of it, and emitting a EMP pulse that wiped the memory of most of the people who caused it.

  3. engtech
    Posted September 22, 2006 at | Permalink

    A million posts? You must have a lot of writers.

  4. Mozey
    Posted September 25, 2006 at | Permalink

    THANK YOU for sharing that much! :) these types of details are very usefull to people hwo are starting out.

  5. engtech
    Posted May 09, 2007 at | Permalink

    It’s funny looking back on this and thinking 35,000 a week was notable. Now it is my weekly average.

2 Trackbacks

  1. By I Digg It - Week 2 (With more Trunk Monkey) « //engtech on September 30, 2006 at

    [...] How did I get to the front page of Digg? [...]

  2. By The Holy Grail of Synchronization: How to synchronize Microsoft Outlook (multiple locations), Google Calendar, Gmail, iPod, and mobile phone with Funambol / ScheduleWorld. « //engtech on September 30, 2006 at

    [...] An analysis of the traffic in the first week [...]