Love the new Digg or hate it, the controversy surrounding its launch is a big deal.
The Digg user community is in the throes of a chaotic and noisy protest, clamoring for the ending of numerous griefs that they feel the fourth version of Digg is causing them.
What Digg’s plan is for the next few days is somewhat up in the air, but tweets from Kevin Rose seem to point to a course of changes that will placate the most aggrieved users that make Digg what it is.
Part of the protest that was thrown up yesterday was to promote the Reddit Digg account, and to shift all its stories to more than just the Digg ‘Top News’ frontpage, but to the top ten list as well. In short, to raise a ruckus, Digg users made Reddit take over Digg for the day. That is old news, what is new are the numbers that Reddit has posted on just what happened during that surge.
Reddit had several main claims: Digg sent us 250,000 hits which is about 1/7th of our normal traffic, new signups spiked, and our servers did not collapse.
Two things spring to mind. First, Reddit’s claim of a quarter million hits from Digg during the period seems very low. Based on personal experience, taking up as many slots as Reddit did on the Digg top ten, they should have seen a least twice the traffic that they did. This leads us to point two: either Digg’s move towards ‘My News’ is working, and users are beginning to shift their focus there, or Digg’s traffic is down. Time will tell.
Reddit, a very open place, was kind enough to share some very interesting graphs for their day in the Digg spotlight. This is their new user sign up rate:
And this is their traffic tab, tracking their served impressions per hour:
However you slice it, Digg sent Reddit hundreds of thousands of new visitors, hardly the way the Digg crew wanted to celebrate the launch of their long awaited, and much toiled over, new site. If you were Digg, what would you do?
What might be even more interesting is the conversion rate of Reddit from visitors to sign ups. They got about 1/7th of their normal traffic from digg. That would suggest 2 million visitors at D-Day (7*250k+250k).
9.000 signups would result in a conversion rate of around 0,45%
On a normal day their conversion rate is much lower (5000/1750k*100%), around 0,28%
That would suggest that the traffic they got from Digg lead to a way higher conversion to new users than normal traffic. It could be that Digg users, known with the concept of social news tools, are more likely to switch to a similar service (well at least a service that looks a bit like the old Digg)
That makes sense. I think that due to the “digg users go to reddit hype” that a good number of Digg users signed up just to test the service. I wonder how many will stick around.
I bet though, being a fan of both sites, that the differences between Digg and Reddit (even the new Digg) are great enough that most ex-Diggers come back to the fold.
Reddit would have gotten a lot more traffic if they had optional horizontal lines between stories to make it more readable. Also, a lot of their screen real estate, especially on the right is unused. I do not see any reason why their layout should not be fully customizable by users.
As for Digg, its sort of a wait and see situation since they obviously need time to make changes and stabilize. The user base seems to be calming down a bit.
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I love it. I hope Digg learns from this.
woww, this is something and yes spicy.
I like Digg’s concept. I cant seem to find what is broken on V3.