Web publishers, forget about Digg. Use StumbleUpon!

Written on July 2, 2008 – 12:22 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

As every ambitious web publisher does, I’m trying out some alternative ways to attract more visitors. The most important ways are still to offer great content and strive to address the information needs of readers as much as possible - yet it doesn’t hurt anyone to experiment with the possibilities digital media offers us. Of course there’s the SEO card, for which I gladly refer to Yoast, and then there’s that other popular option, social media.

The long term benefit of Digg

In the early days of this blog, Boris wrote a post about the long term benefits of Digg. Back then, we got a fair share of our visitors found us through Digg. According to Boris, this was caused by two trends:

People use alternative ways of searching, like social media.
Deborah Schultz reported that 61% of your visits go to posts older than a month, presumably through Google and.., social media.

We still welcome around the same amount of visitors via Digg, only the percentage is much lower now (around 1 percent of all referring links from the last thirty days). As you can tell by the screen shot below, this isn’t really impressive. Although there’s a long tail of two pages, these top 5 results give an idea of the number of referrers.

Top 5 Digg.com articles of the last thirty days
Top 5 Digg articles of the last thirty days

So apart from the frontpage mentions, Digg hasn’t be really useful. The long term benefit is quite marginal.

Well, here’s an alternative

Another service did prove to be very useful when it comes to finding new readers: StumbleUpon. Clicks from this service account for 3,2 percent of all our referring links the last thirty days (by the way, most referrers are other bloggers and Google). In a way, this makes sense, as StumbleUpon is all about discovery. When people want to search, they go to Google, when they want to find popular articles, they go to Digg, yet when people want to discover interesting content, StumbleUpon is the place to go to. Partly because of that, it has been the second most popular social media site the last thirty days (Reddit was no. 1 because we hit the frontpage). Here are the top five results:

Top 5 StumbleUpon articles of the last thirty days

Some more fun facts

For this blog, an article on Digg brings in roughly three times more traffic than on Reddit (10000 compared to 300)
Hacker News is the no. 3 social medium for us, these guys from Ycombinator bring in 3 percent of all visitors who came here via a referrer.
Delicious only accounts for 0.6 percent, even though we got featured in the popular section. It seems like this service is really all about self-reference.

I hope you like that post!

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delicious, digg, hacker news, reddit, social media, stumbleupon

About the author: Ernst-Jan is blogger and co-organizer of BLOG08, who previously worked in New York to cover news at the United Nations. Next to writing, he's also a singer in the band Christina Five. Follow him on Twitter or read his personal blog Dutchproblogger.com .

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6 comments/trackbacks to “Web publishers, forget about Digg. Use StumbleUpon!”

Jul 3, 2008: Dan Wilson: UK-Based eBay Expert, Online Community Specialist, Author, Copywriter and Blogger
[...] you using StumbleUpon? Here’s why it might be better than [...]
Jul 7, 2008: Bloody Condom Daily Links » Blog Archive » July 7, 2008
[...] Digg vs Stumbleupon [...]
Aug 12, 2008: Twitter: Invented in 1935
[...] here from StumbleUpOn? Want to know how to hack Feedburner and add thousands of RSS subscribers in one day? Or maybe you [...]

By David Hobson on Jul 2, 2008

Good post i`ve always prefered Stumbleupon over digg as it gives you more traffic over the long run unless you can hit the Digg homepage on a daily basis.

[Reply]
By Ton Wesseling on Jul 2, 2008

Visibility is nice, but shouldn’t you give more attention to where your active and loyal visitors came from? How much is the share of digg and SU from your weekly fanbase as original first referer? How to measure? For example did you had a look at the amount of time people who came in from digg or SU have spend on your site? How many articles did they read? Did they bookmark your rss feed?

Let me know if you need help with that!

[Reply]
By steven on Jul 3, 2008

Actually in the old days, wikipedia was fantastic, not only were the links ‘follow’ but the quality of traffic was even better than search. I still think relevant links in wikipedia can have a great impact.

Yahoo answers might be the next one to work: if you have relevant content that you can add, answers.yahoo.com this could well become a source of quality traffic.

HN the community is very good, a tip for this however, posting at the right time of day makes a lot of difference. The active members that bump up stories seem to be active very early in the morning before 7 am French time, and late in the evening here, if you miss their window you will likely see submissions sunk by spam.

[Reply]

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