Digg is only a year and a half old, but it is already a significant social force that moves massive attention and traffic around the Internet. As has been noted for some time, it has been steadily closing the gap in alexa comparisons with Slashdot, and now has more than 800,000 average daily visitors. For further comparisons, check out digg vs. dot, a site that looks at crossposts on Digg and Slashdot. From recent personal experience, I can say that Digg certainly sends a lot of traffic to popular stories (whether that traffic ever returns is another story).
And Digg continues to release new features to build community. It now allows ratings of individual comments. And users can now also track the activities of their friends on digg as well.
Along with that power, of course, comes some negative attention as well - specifically people trying to game Digg for their own purposes. It can be as simple as using fake accounts to push a story up to the front page. As the site gets more popular, this becomes harder to do, but the reward (more traffic) also gets correspondingly larger. The increased costs are matched by increased incentives.
The most recent story of abuse is a suggestion that people are using Digg to artificially inflate the price of a public company - Sun - by promoting a rumor that Google may be acquiring the company. Digg has a number of protections in place to guard against bad news - including user flags of suspicious posts.
But the real story isn’t about how people are gaming Digg, or how Digg fights it. The important news is that Digg is so big now that people are trying to game it to do things like affect the stock price of a public company. That says a lot about the bright future of this young site.
Digg would be tremendously more useful with social networking. Promotion according to votes by people in my network couldn’t be gamed as easily, and the items would likely be more relevant to me.
Wow I didn’t know digg was so big. The gaming will happen with any large website, but what can digg do to stop people from doing this?
I have a pessimistic view of Digg. Any kind of democracy is bound to fall (quickly) when its citizens have too much power and will. The leaders of the democracy may try to do anything to keep their society steady and in a stable state - including taking away democratic rights.
It is pretty easy to filter out people trying to game the system. My site recieves 5 times as many pageviews a day as digg and i use similar user reviews for parts of the site, took me a whole 4 hours to write. I run my entire site all by myself. I’m really curious what digg is doing with all that money they raised and what the programmers are actually doing?
Yea i love digg, its definitely for the people and by the people, i love their articles too they are definitely rocking
I love Digg. Along with techcrunch it is the site i visit the most. While I don’t always participate in the social side of things, i always use it as a good source of new information.
I believe that the money raised in recent venture capital is being used to extend the digg site as well as provide all the backend servers. Kevin rose the owner said he has to double the amount of servers every month to keep up with demand.
Another nice site: http://diggdot.us/
A merge of digg, slashdot, and del.icio.us/popular
And the Digg community has developed many cool tools too.
http://www.quickonlinetips.com.....ollection/
Ben i did some reading, i find it nearly unbelievable what i saw. Digg ordered 18 servers a few weeks ago, Keven is quotated as saying they would order 100 additional servers between oct 2005 and March 2006. Digg is just a train wreck waiting to happen. They only have 5 million pageviews a day. My site is doing 14 million pageviews a day, and 80 million pageviews a day from users polling the site for updates. I use a grand total of 4 SERVERS. My average query load is a good 5 to 10 times as complex as digg. I really have to question diggs long term chances of survival.
Markus if your dating site gets 14 million page views a day then I’m the Queen of England.
Here’s an interesting comparison:
Fold was featured on TechCrunch about two weeks ago. That resulted in about 3,000-4,000 hits over the course of a day.
On Friday we made it on the Digg frontpage for about 12 hrs. That generated more than 50,000 hits within about 14 hrs.
So, yes, they are big.
“Markus if your dating site gets 14 million page views a day then I’m the Queen of England.”
x2
http://www.plentyoffish.com/pageviews.jpg
I’m also the largest individual adsense publisher, the only site in the top 100 run by one person etc. Plentyoffish is the 3rd largest dating site in north america after yahoo and match.
Remember to take that Alexa data with a grain of salt. It only gets data from people with the Alexa toolbar installed.
“(whether that traffic ever returns is another story)”
Im am a steady reader and have been for a while now and I came from Digg.
Markus, your site blows
14 Million Pageviews, Crap!
80 Million Pageviews from polling, Total crap!
Get a decent site markus, if your site got posted on digg it would be offline within a hour or less, not that it would ever get on dig, unless it was for crap site of the year award.
Trying to attack my credability is ridiculous.
Ranking.websearch.com is a division of ask jeeves. They have their toolbar installed on 13% of web traffic. one in 5000 visitors has alexa installed on my site.
http://ranking.websearch.com/S.....offish.com
I’m listed as the 58th most trafficed site on the net in terms of pageviews. If you pay $25,000 subscription for hitwise they will tell you the same thing. If you type in my domain name here. http://inventory.overture.com/.....uggestion/ You will see it gets hundreds of thousands of searchs per month.
At any rate All i’m saying is that digg is doing something seriously wrong as they would only need a handful of servers not hundreds for that kind of traffic.
I would tend to agree with markus. I am a relatively long time user of digg, and have seen it go from a small site (back when there were
I will admit that Markus’s site could use a redesign, but it sounds like you guys are just jealous.
wtf my comment got cut? Well, my point was that the site is growing too fast and that the average IQ of the users has gone way down. This reflects itself in the actual website because it is a pure democracy.
Needs a redesign? I’d say whatever he’s doing is pretty much perfect with that kind of traffic.
I thought this was a discussion about digg and not a dating site?
Comment by Oliver Zheng — March 18, 2006 @ 9:29 pm
I have a pessimistic view of Digg. Any kind of democracy is bound to fall (quickly) when its citizens have too much power and will. The leaders of the democracy may try to do anything to keep their society steady and in a stable state - including taking away democratic rights.
*******************
I despise your thoughts, you filth.
Ok, just curious cause Markus believes his site can handle digg type loads. Can you afford the bandwidth costs, and concurrent connections, of testing your site, against the digg effect? Because, whatever digg effect you generate, Digg has all those connections, plus all the others that refuse to go to your website…
I can understand if your not, bandwidth, and concurrent connections can get mighty pricy. But ultimately you really cannot compare any numbers, or say anything about Digg, and compairing to yourself, unless you really have the accurate numbers of digg connections, data load, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. *beating dead horse* I am sure you get the idea..
BTW, totally new to here, but when I see someone claiming that in essence, they can handle the digg effect, and that digg is running ineffectively, I just wonder if they are willing to put it to the test.
LOL
Markus is who he says he is and has a point. Techcrunch can (now) handle the digg effect, plus slashdot effect plus a lot more with a single (virtual) server - so I am wondering why digg needs so much hardware, considering its just pages
To the above user with comment #26..
I have 3 times the traffic that dig has, my output is between 70 to 130mb/sec.
At last count digg had 5 million pageviews. During peak hours that would be 83 pageviews a second. I’ve seen their number of servers listed between 30 and 100.. At 30 servers they are averaging a server for every 2.76 pageviews. At 100 servers they are averaging 1 pageview per server.
I think anyone with an IT background would look at that and say WTF ?
http://www.alexaholic.com/digg.....offish.com
Alexa is useless. 1 in 5000 regular visitors have it installed, 1 in 50 have it installed on tech sites..
Ranking.websearch.com is the front end for those annoying smilies.. 13% of all web traffic has this installed. Plentyoffish is the 58th site ranked on pageviews. It ranks the same on hitwise.com ($25,000 subscription required)
http://ranking.websearch.com/T.....o=digg.com
Congrats Markus. Not only you were able to use the least number of server for that kind of traffic, you also managed to kick in $10,000 per day from Adsense (as Scoble said you do).
If the $10K/day figure is correct, that means the site is making $3.65M/year in ads. Assume 50% revenue share from google, and you must be selling $7M worth of actual ads/year.
Now myspace reports $45 total ad sales last year, and they have more traffic than google??? Google itself reported something like $400M in total ad sales from content partners, so this site alone accounts for nearly 6% of all the ads shown by all the sites on the net?
I guess only Marcus can shed light on the true revenue figures?
The rev share with google is 70-30 to 78 to 22% from what i’ve heard and seen in the 10k filings.
Myspace really sucks, the average visitor has 500 pageviews/unique so the ctr is 1 in 16,000 or so on banner ads. For google the CTR (click through rate) for ads is around 1 in 3.
If you paid the same per pageview on myspace and google your $1000 ad spend on google would net you 5333 clicks for every 1 click you get on myspace.
online4love.com is quickly catching up with our competitors plentyoffish.com and match.com
Markus is misleading the public through his overinflated claims. He makes himself out to be the biggest IT genius since Bill Gates. Really he fabricates numbers to hide the fact that POF is a flash in the pan, is shrinking, not growing, and that its members have tired of Markus and his minions very heavy-handed site administration. That’s led to a huge inrease in turnover of members, with most logging in a few times and immediately getting disgusted and closing their account (for which he riducles them), or never logging in again.
Markus’ only real talent is self promotion and telling the world things that he won’t prove. His goal is to build up the rep of POF and then sell it for for greater then its value.
POF is a flash in the pain that is quickly becoming obsolete withe the rise of newer, better free dating sites like okcupid.com
POF is failing due to the the clumsy, socially inept handling by its founder/shameless self promoter and his gang of unpaid yes men, the site moderators. The crew turns off members through the most Nixon-ish rules on the net-no criticism of the site allowed or members accounts are deleted.
This kind of Napleon complex means POF is destined to fail.
No credible evidence is ever provided of the sites purported huge profitibility.
Also another excellent example of the power of Digg through this blog post from Geekcapital.com.
http://www.geekcapital.com/200.....-this-job/
This made huge headlines and received around 7000 diggs in a 24 hours period….read the more recent posts for the full story.
looks like this is a chatroom for fights between datingsite operators