The effect of being buried on Digg
Last night a story on hmtk.com made the front page of Digg. This story was written by my friend Force Drainer and it is called 501st Legion Inducts Kevin Smith as “friend”.
The story made it to the front page of Digg just a few minutes before midnight on Monday March 5th. Upon reaching the front page the blog received a massive amount of traffic and collapsed. Duggmirror was able to cache the content so people were still able to read the story.
Over the course of the AM hours the story began to draw less and less traffic until 5:00AM EST time when it began to build back up again. This lasted until a little after 10:00AM EST when the story was buried.
I have to wonder how much higher that traffic graph would have grown if the story was not buried when lunch time hit on the East Coast. The fact that a Digg story brought in almost 15K hits between the hours of midnight and 10:00AM is telling enough of the power of Digg.
As you can see from the traffic chart the story was on a tremendous traffic rise until it got buried. Once a story is buried it not only falls off of the front page of Digg but it also falls off of the sub-category pages and it is removed from the popular archive.
The story had a good run while it lasted and I'm surprised it wasn't buried as soon as it was submitted (as so many things from blogs are these days).
If you look at the image on the right (click to see the full sized image) you can see how the story took a very long time to grow, 22 hours before it hit.
To be honest I am a bit surprised it was buried after making the front page. It features Star Wars and Kevin Smith (Silent Bob) not to mention Stan Lee (you know, the comic book guy) this is the kind of thing most geeks are into, at least most geeks I know.
UPDATE
Something strange is going on. This afternoon, near 2:15PM EST, I started seeing hits from Digg that would indicate the story was no longer buried i.e. digg.com/news/page# links. Is it posible that the new changes at Digg allow for stories to be unburied if enough Diggs come in?
Also, just about the time the story fell off the homepage their was a suspicious referrer in my logs from a http://digg3.crawl.internal/offbeat_news/STAR_WARS_Kevin_Smith_Gets_Inducted_into_501st_Legion_exclusive_pics_vid/... Something smells fishy to me!
Well now I see where the spike came from! ;)
Yep, and it was on its way to becoming an even bigger spike!!!
So far, I haven’t heard of smaller time bloggers like us who did not face a crash with the serve our site is on when the story makes it to the front page. It is definitely some good exposure for you with the traffic spike. And, it is even harder to get onto the front page of Digg. One must seriously have a unique and great story in a mixture!
Lately stories that crash disappear from the front page. After all, there used to be days that every front page story on digg would not load. Since digg is all about appearances lately, I guess it’s smart on their behalf to auto bury these stories (why generate traffic for duggmirror?).
The more interesting story here would be testing their new auto-bury algorithm….More to come….
And on another note, if you’re running your server from home, it’s one thing, if not - my cheapo godaddy account has survived diggs and stumbles…I guess I’d recommend it.
The server crashed when the story first hit the frontpage, near midnight. There were no problems when the story was buried. The story was gaining popularity when it was “auto-buried”…
So the mystery here is HOW the story is still being able to be accessed even when it was already ‘auto-buried’, isn’t it?
If the story was just being acces from the submission page on Digg or through a link from a friend it would be clear.
When I see a link coming in from “digg/news/page2″ it baffles me! that sort of incoming link should not be showing up if the story is buried.
Yeah a lot of bloggers are writing about this at the moment (even though you broke it 3 months ago). Digg probably changed the algo temporarily so no one will have definite proof…they’re like that.