How Much is YOUR Digg Worth? Secrets of the Digg Economy Unveiled!

Will Smith — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:22:27 -0500

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.

Site-by-Site Analysis

Apologies to our friends at Gizmodo and Lifehacker for making them our guinea pigs, but Gawker is one of the only site networks that actually publishes the number of page views each story gets. With that information and some info from Gawker and Maximum PC’s media kits we were able to paint an (admittedly) simplified picture of the price-per-Digg for a selection of stories on various sites.

Gizmodo

Gizmodo articles frequently hit the front page of Digg, usually thanks to some sort of Apple-related coverage, or, say, spy shots of Google’s Android phone. And in our study, Gizmodo had one of the highest Digg values we saw. We attribute this to the fact that the stories we surveyed were of interest to a wide variety of readers, so people actually read the articles they Digg, and this translated into real-world page views, which of course translated into advertising dollars. The average value of a Digg on Gizmodo hovered right at $2.76, the highest of any site we looked at.

Gizmodo

Story	D	V^d	D^y	D^u
How many Google engineers...	1843	161.5k	$2.63	$32.30
Android Flaws	817	105k	$3.84	$20.93
Top Android Apps	1117	67.4k	$1.81	$13.48

Lifehacker

Lifehacker’s awesome how-tos and productivity tips appeal to the more focused type A personalities among the Digg community. While Lifehacker stories don’t benefit from the dogpile effect—where lots of people mash Digg on stories that they don’t necessarily read—they do have a dedicated following among the Digg elite. Average value of a Digg on Lifehacker: $2.05.

Lifehacker

Story	D	V^d	D^y	D^u
Top Five Linux Distros	803	57k	$2.13	$11.40
Hive Five	953	59k	$1.86	$11.83
Top Five Bittorrent	1047	75.6k	$2.17	$15.13

Kotaku

Gamers are undoubtedly familiar with Kotaku, Gawker’s gaming blog. With beaucoup console coverage every day, Kotaku constantly delivers on Digg’s front page. Unfortunately for Kotaku, many of its stories suffer from the dogpile and have lots of Diggs, but not many page views. The average value of your Digg on a Kotaku story is a mere $0.80.

Kotaku

Story	D	V^d	D^y	D^u
Spore Created Starcraft	2905	144k	$1.49	$28.84
Jack Thompson Disbarred	7544	144k	$0.57	$28.85
Spore DRM Bannings	1092	28k	$0.77	$5.63
Games and the Election	387	5k	$0.39	$1.00

Maximum PC

Finally, we come to Maximum PC. Because we have the benefit of having access to raw data for our site, we’re able to isolate traffic that Digg’s responsible for from inbound links for the rest of the Internet. We pulled our typical ad rates from our online media kit, and were able to calculate an approximate value for each Digg of $1.27.

Maximum PC

Story	D	V^d	D^y	D^u
Vista Interview	1709	35k	$1.54	$17.50
24 Hour Notebook Battery	1238	35k	$0.61	$5.00
CD Turns 26	1353	15k	$0.83	$7.50
USB 3.0 Unveiled	2061	49k	$1.78	$24.50
Risk Free Linux Install	699	15k	$1.61	$7.50

So, what have we learned? The main thing is that even though your Digg clicks have very little perceived value to you, they do have real monetary value. By participating in a large social networking site like Digg, you essentially hold the keys to a vast amount of traffic, which you can push to sites whose content entertains or informs you. So use that power wisely!

Maximum PC gizmodo RSS Feed

How Much is YOUR Digg Worth? Secrets of the Digg Economy Unveiled!

Site-by-Site Analysis

Gizmodo

Lifehacker

Kotaku

Maximum PC