(The results are in. Read them at StumbleUpon vs Digg).
Bloggers and webmasters out there who watch their traffic as closely as we do have been amazed by the “Stumble Effect”. Many know about the sudden burst of traffic that comes from the “Digg Effect” when a submission reaches the front page of Digg (or even better, if it reaches the “Top in All…” section on the frontpage). This is normally a day of joy (or terror if your server bombs) followed by limited tricklings of traffic.
Stumble has a different, more steady infusion of traffic that it can send to a website that gets stumbled, especially if it is hit by multiple top users. The effect is sustained, but more importantly, can be rejuvinated by a thumbs up and/or review by the right person/people.
Digg, on the other hand, has the advantage of having “controlled” traffic. Anyone watching their posts as they’re submitted and rising on Digg can pinpoint if and approximately when their page will go popular. You know when the traffic is coming and you know when it will stop.
The thing that truly piqued our curiosity was something that happened last Sunday. This blog has had several stories hit the front page of Digg and other social networks and has received a ton of Stumble traffic over the weeks. Last Sunday, someone “powerful” Stumbled a story. Shortly after that, someone else with power stumbler status reviewed it. Ninety seconds later, our server was dead, and it took an act of congress and an upgrade in equipment to get the site live again. That never happened with any of the Diggs.
So, let’s experiment. The idea has been percolating for a while, but James Pegram’s Blog beat us to the punch. No worries. The post was excellent, but there is a ton more that can be learned. On Digg, as stories move down the front page and on to the next, the traffic slows, like tall rollercoaster freefall that hits tremendous speeds, then gradually levels out and slows. Stumble is like a bumpy rollercoaster in the dark. You know the traffic will go up and down, you just don’t know when it’s going to go up, nor when it’s going to stop.
A quick note about incentive: This blog makes next to nothing in ad revenue. That can be expected, as almost all of its traffic is generated by social media users who are normally too web-savvy to click on adsense or purchase from an advertising banner. Most, in fact, surf the web so much that they are now “blind” to these forms of marketing. Then, there are those who use browser extensions to block the ads altogether.
For this experiment, we won’t put any adsense or advertising in the story, just so nobody thinks there are ulterior motives involved. The sidebar will have the coffee banner (there more for asthetic purposes, as nobody buys coffee from a social media blog) and some text ads, but the story itself will be cleaner than any others on the site.
That should make our $0.63 average daily revenue plummet, but for research, no sacrifice is too great.
No, this article will track the traffic generated as well as hour by hour, sometimes even minute by minute updates to the data stream. Who’s Stumbling, how may Diggs, times on front page, added Stumble reviews — the list will grow as more data becomes available. We’ll watch who stumbles it and when as well as where it moves on Digg.
There are potential drawbacks. Despite the fact that this website does not make enough money to cover the hosting, there will be those who think it’s a ploy to somehow put cash in our pockets. There will be those who get some kind of joy out of messing experiments like these up. They will bury it on Digg and thumb it down on Stumble. I’ll give it a 30% chance on Digg and a 50% chance on Stumble.
All data will be posted here with times and results as they become available.
* * *
Read more info at the Social Media Blog.
About JD Rucker
I Stumbled here.
Thanks for the info. I find Stumbleupon a lot better than Digg for non-tech or pop-culture related topics. I also find reddit.com very useful for driving traffic.
From a user point of view, stumbleupon® is much more attractive as it lets the user become a passenger while other users with similar interests do the driving.
Even if a user has no intentions to do the driving, they may find something they like (a page of interest, say), then they may give it the thumbs up and another user with the same topic of interest will stumble upon it randomly.
But there’s no way of telling whether the page of interest will even be seen because stumbleupon® selects the next page randomly (even if the user is only stumbling the one topic of interest)…
…It’s just more likely to be seen.
This randomness is most likely the reason why stumble traffic is unpredictable.
In my opinion the most attractive thing about stumbleupon® for a user is the way users control content and the reporting system that limits (to a great extent) advertising and off topic stumbles. Such an example would be…
…A user who is an advertising PR exec (i.e. pure evil concentrate) starts up a stumbler profile. He/she then would submit a thumbs up and review of a page or pages pertaining to their client’s goods and services. Or even a page with no real content and a lot of banners, pop ups etc.
Other users who are savvy would pick up on this violation of stumbleupon® policy and report the stumbler as a spammer. Consequently our PR guru would be banned and have their profile deleted.
Digg content on the other hand seems bit too contrived and controlled by moderators and possibly pure evil concentrate.
Does this mean a cleaver soul could use Stumble and Digg to engineer a denial of service attack with out those actually perputrating the attack ever knowing what they’re involved in. Think about it you only have to post fake reviews and thumbs up relating to the site you want to bring down and the two systems are going to aim loads of traffic at it, it seems this crashed the site mentoned above. I dont know whether this is a really cleaver h4ck or a massive oversite on the part of the operators of Digg and Stumble.
First of all, great idea! I’m sure the results will be of most interest. I just have a question: what makes an important stumbler “important”? Is it de amount of stumbles in his/her behalf? Is it how many followers he/she has? Is it the amount of reviews or discoveries? Or the time he/she has been part of the stumble community? I didn’t know that stumbles have a “specific weight” when it came to likes (Y) or dislikes (N) and a relatively noticeable influence in stumble traffic…
BTW, I just noticed the date of this post…
Where or the results?!
Where are the results and statistics?
“All data will be posted here with times and results as they become available.” ….
hey, nice read. Who are you hosting with if you don’t mind telling me.
I’ve been hit with the “digg effect” on my site and ofcourse shared hosting being what it is, server died. I want to know what sort of specs it would take to survive both the digg effect and stumble.
u can email me at the email i provided in the comments form.
thanks
I love Digg, and in fact I usually Digg post instead of Stumble, but most of my traffic comes from StumbleUpon. I really need to start using it more. LOL!
thank you perfec web site
I was surprise to learn that Stumbleupon was actually getting more traffic than I thought. It says here they have reached 1 billion a month http://www.webhostingsearch.com/blog/1-billion-stumbles-every-month-0995. I honestly love digg but after that huge update they made, I don’t enjoy it that much anymore. They should revert back to the old template they were using or they may end up losing readers to competitors like stumbleupon and reddit which keeps on improving.
For years, I was a digg fan, but recently in the past 4 months, because of the complete difference in overall traffic and ease of use, I’ve been using stumbleupon more.
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