Odds are, we’ve all done it: Clicked that little Digg button on a story we liked or were entertained by or just plain laughed at. But have you ever considered the unbelievable traffic pushing-power you have as a button-masher, even as the smallest cog in the Digg army? To find out exactly how much cold, hard cash your click on a Digg badge is worth, we plugged a bunch of publicly available information into our handy-dandy spreadsheet, and hit the calculate button.

While we’ve all been dutifully clicking stories on social networking sites like Digg and Reddit for the last few years, we never really considered the specific dollar value of those clicks. Until now.  Number-crunching reveals that each click of the Digg button has a real, measurable and significant value, at least for stories that reach Digg’s front page.

Digg is a great site to serve as our case study: There’s a large active user base (the folks who Digg stories) that’s backed up by an even larger number of people who take advantage of the active users’ good taste to quickly find interesting new stuff to read online. When a story hits the Digg front page, tens of thousands of people click on the link at the same time. What’s more, there are a large number of sites that vie for Digg-generated traffic on a daily basis—Maximum PC included. Digg has the potential to help the financial bottom line for many an Internet business.

Now, we’re going to lead off by conceding that our tests are in no way representative of the entire Digg community. Our sample size consists of MaximumPC.com stories that hit the Digg front page, plus a selection of stories from sites that list the number of page views each story gets; Gawker network sites provide this information, which is why they’ve been included in this study. However, our analysis of the admittedly limited data showed that something we viewed as intrinsically worthless (a single Digg) actually has a real monetary value—and we created a formula to figure it out:

D^y is the value of a single Digg. V^d is the page views referred by (that is, generated by ) Digg. R^v is the revenue generated per page view. And D is the total number of Diggs a story has received. Du is the value of every Digg that is applied before a story hits the front page, and is found by replacing D with 150, which seems to be the average number of Diggs necessary for a story to hit the front page these days.

Now, obviously, this is an oversimplification. We have no way of knowing the actual value of the ads that were running on any of these sites at the very moment a story hit the front page (because advertising rates on most sites can vary from one ad to the next). We also have no way of knowing how many of the views on these stories actually come from Digg or from links that are unrelated to Digg. (Even for Maximum PC, where we have full access to the website traffic stats, we can’t really tell how many total pages Digg users view on multi-page stories).

All that said, we can take the reported page views for stories that appeared on the front page of Digg, and compare these page views to those of stories posted at about the same time but didn’t appear on Digg. Also, for our study, we assumed that each site’s posted ad rate was representative of the revenue generated when that site’s story hit the front page of Digg.

And all this approximation and math yielded a fascinating, if not dramatic, outcome: According to our admittedly limited data, every time you Digg a story that has hit, or eventually hits, the front page, your buttom-mash is worth about $2.

Even more intriguing: If you’re one of the brave users who ventures out into the unfiltered world of “Upcoming” Digg content, your Digg is worth more. You see, when a story crosses over the threshold from the Upcoming area to the front page, Diggs made on that story instantly become valuable. When most stories hit the front page, the result is a kind of pile-on effect, where thousands of people read the story and agree that it deserves recognition, which they affirm by Digging the story themselves. Because of this dynamic, the very first 100 to 200 Diggs that it takes to reach the front page are infinitely more valuable than the 1200 or 1800 that follow. And are you ready for the news on just how valuable your pace-setting Digg is? Get this: If you regularly Digg stories in the Upcoming section, your Digg of a story that eventually hits the front page is worth about $15, on average.

Next up, the site-by-site per Digg breakdown, for Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, and Maximum PC.

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