89,094% Traffic Increase: Data on the Slashdot / Digg Effect

themetricsystem.rjmetrics.com

8 points·jakestein··6 comments

Two things that I wouldn't mention except that the source is a metrics company, and so these fine distinctions may be worth considering...

() when reporting an 890x rise in traffic, precision to the percentile ("89,09_4_%") is a bit silly. Hell, I'd just round up to 900x.

() the very idea of reporting the increase as a percentage or multiple is suspect; the peak traffic is not a function of the earlier traffic. Rather, it's an absolute spike based on keen interest in the article topic, and the arbitrary multiple tells us more about how small the pre-spike traffic was than the size of the slashdot/digg effect. The real number of interest is the absolute value: ~110K page views over the peak 3 days.

Yep, that matches up with my experience when my blog got slashdotted and dugg and all that.

The thing they don't know yet is they'll get a good 2-800 daily hits from the residual effects of being linked by so many other sites, many months in the future.

Traffic sharkfins aren't something to be proud of, really.

explain. It's better than a sharp stick in the eye, right?

Agreed. I think it's unrealistic to hope that level of traffic from the first 2 days of being on slashdot and digg would continue. And it's clearly a good thing that our new company blog got lots of exposure. So I'd greatly prefer a sharkfin to a flatline. Especially since, as swombat suggested, we have been getting residual traffic as well.

Very true, not to mention the S/N ratio of Digg and Slashdot traffic (especially Digg traffic) is really pretty horrible.

My personal experience (3 slashdottings about 5 years ago, 2 diggs and a techcrunch in the last year) are that those traffic spikes have very few nuggets of valuable hits in them.

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