Digg and Techmeme are Dead. Long live TweetMeme!

The image below here shows why in the age of Twitter, Digg is starting to get less interesting to bloggers. Making it to the front page of Digg is still cool but just as hard (maybe even harder) as it was 3 years ago. Having your message retweeted is a lot easier. Also, 1 Digg doesn’t get you any traffic. 10 Diggs? No traffic. 100 Diggs? Well, only if it makes it to the ‘Upcoming’ section.

A retweet is ALWAYS good for traffic. I just checked the last 10 visitors from Twitter. They had a combined audience of 8116 followers, an average of 800 followers per user. One retweet potentially reaches those 800 followers.

In reality the reach of a retweet is a lot lower, of course. My guess is that a retweet gets an average 5% clickthrough. A link posted to 1000 followers generates 50 visitors. On average. A lot of our posts here get retweeted 50 or 100 times. You do the math.

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Now take another look at the graph at the top. That graph is true for Blogs but doesn’t apply to retweets. Blogs need to be original. No point in writing about the same thing twice. Retweets are different. The whole purpose of a Retweet is to, well, repeat.

So, Tweetmeme is twice as interesting for us as bloggers than Digg. Digg is a zero-sum game. You either make it to the frontpage, or not. A retweet is always useful and it never gets dull.

The same goes for Techmeme. Making it to Techmeme is hard. You need to be first AND important enough to matter. I have always been disappointed however when we did make it (i’d say we make it to Techmeme about once a week) because although people seem to think this is a big deal I hardly ever saw any traffic coming from it.

Tweetmeme is a completely different beast. Make it to the front page of Tweetmeme and you see traffic! Lots of it! Which might also explain the surge of traffic to TweetMeme recently:

It is amazing that Digg didn’t/hasn’t/won’t launch TweetMeme functionality and the same goes for TechMeme. Just as Digg took away the throne from SlashDot it looks like TweetMeme is on track to do the same to Digg.

Of course this doesn’t mean we don’t WANT to make it to the Digg front page! If you definitely absolutely want to Digg this post we won’t stop you. Just don’t forget to retweet it too. ;-)