Digg traffic is worthless
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I’m calling the value of Digg–and all social bookmarking sites by proxy–into question here. I admit, none of my sites have ever been heavily Dugg (I hate that damn word), but then again I don’t write about the holy trinity of social bookmarking (useless gadgets, useless politicians, and Paris Hilton).
First let’s take a very biased sampling of opinion from around the Web:
“For me, Digg traffic is fairly worthless. Yes, I really did just write that. It’s always been an information source not a traffic source for me … I have never really seen a blog or sites with some ads make anything worth bragging over, cash/revenue wise from a Digg blast, and if it has happened, it’s definitely a rarity or just a plain lucky fluke.” — Super Affiliate Marketing Blog
“I had joined Digg last year, buying into the hype that this is something we must do in a Web 2.0 world. The belief is that the traffic that comes is great for your marketing efforts. I’ve already written about my dislike for Digg and how some Diggers gang up to get sites banned in industries they don’t like. I seem to be unable to unjoin it.” — CRE8PC
“I can get traffic from these guys, but they don’t get me any clicks. To me, this traffic is worthless.” — Digital Point thread
“Digg traffic does not equal advertising dollars. Many webmasters have advertising on their sites, like Google’s Adsense or Yahoo!’s YPN and mistakenly thing that getting dugg will equal money in their pockets. This is dead wrong. The people that use digg don’t click on ads, they’re the wrong crowd for contextual advertising, and the webmaster usually ends up paying for a ton of bandwidth and lowers his click-through rate, thereby causing himself to be smart-priced out of the higher-paying ads that might have been shown on his site.” — Drew McKinney
Digg traffic is the mainstream equivalent of TGP traffic in the adult webmaster world. For those not familiar, TGPs (thumbnail gallery posts) are responsible for the bulk of free pornography on the Web. Their goal is to get users to look at the free content and entice them to see more–at a price, of course. However, TGPs are terrible at converting. A novice adult webmaster is more likely to go broke from excess bandwidth charges than he is to make a sale.
I’m not sure if I want any of my pages to make the Digg front page. It’s basically a crap shoot whether the traffic converts. If it does, well, I make a few bucks. If not, then my click-through rate plummets, and I’m smart-priced out of higher paying ads.
That’s a gamble I don’t want to take.