Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Correlating votes on Digg with website traffic

Anonymous Prof has written a very nice post analyzing the amount of traffic that flows to websites from front page stories on Digg. S/he took website traffic data from Alexa and investigated the change in traffic that resulted from a page on each site making it onto the front page of Digg. For large websites, the effects were negligible, but for smaller sites (less than 0.0005% of pageviews on Alexa) the effects are quite apparent. The traffic increased by around 0.1% per vote on Digg, meaning that a story receiving 500 diggs (votes) would temporarily increase traffic to the site hosting the content by around 50%. The effect on very small sites (those not indexed by Alexa) would obviously be much bigger, and often causes the webserver to go down under load.

Anonymous Prof's post on visualizing the last.fm social network is also worth a look for the cool pictures.

2 comments:

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