The Digg effect part 2 - with graphs

A visual representation of the Digg effect
The first graph shows hits only, note the spike on the 5th is from being mentioned on Digg. On the 16th, www.floodle.net was mentioned on an online forum.

The second graph shows the hits and the page views, note that visitors from the online forum viewed many more pages than Digg visitors.



Phil

The Digg effect

A story that hit front page had a link to http://www.floodle.net in it and as a result I got a part of the Digg effect though not the full force. I like to analyse my stats when this happens to get a feel for different types of users, here are my conclusions for Digg users. Statements are generalisations of course but are for the average Digg user..

Things I know (in general):
Digg users don't click ad's (partly due to ad blockers, the ad click ratio plummeted and the ad total barely moved if at all)
Digg users mainly use firefox (over 50%)
Digg users don't use Linux (about 2%)
Digg users don't browse sites, they only look at the one page submitted
Digg users appear to be quite young based on type of stories that get dugg
Digg users don't return to dugg sites after the initial visit so getting dugg is not a way to get regulars.
Digg comments are never as in depth or as technical as slashdot comments
Digg comments are also much lower in number than slashdot comments
Digg.com, by asking users to feedback on their advertisers, is virtually begging users to click it's ads. Another sign that digg users are not generally consumers.

Things I suspect:
Digg's Alexa ranking is overinflated because Digg allows people to post story links to users own sites and people who own sites are more likely to use the Alexa toolbar. Most slashdot users would not install Alexa because they consider it spyware.

Conclusions
Having a story or web page dugg makes a peak in your stats but it is a very steep up and down spike with little after effect.

Not being a technical site it's unlikely floodle.net will ever be "slashdotted" however I would welcome any comments from site owners who have been as to their conclusions.

Phil

The eBay feedback system

I've never been badly scammed on eBay though I have been in the situation of leaving a positive feedback comment when a negative was due simply because I didn't want a revenge negative.

When dealing with high volume sellers, one negative for them makes little difference whereas one negative for you can have a major impact on your feedback rating. If a high volume seller gets too many negatives they will simply drop that account and start a new one, quickly building up positive feedback selling very low cost items like eBooks.

A quick search of the net for users views of eBay's feedback system produces a near unanimous opinion that it is virtually useless except in the most extreme cases. Users are very unlikely to leave a negative and in fact will not even leave a neutral as that will usually trigger a revenge negative.

There is now a solution to this problem, http://www.ohrep.com has been created to provide an anonymous feedback system for eBay and other online auction sites.

Users who wish to make a negative or neutral remark about an eBay seller but prefer not to do so through eBay's own feedback system can now do this without the risk of a negative in revenge.

Phil

New fair movie downloads

I propose that the MPAA make the first half of all movies available for download.
If it's enjoyable then you pay to see the second half, if not then you don't bother. There have been a few films I've watched all the way through just because I'd paid for them, if they had just been on TV I would have changed channels.
I think they'd get more sales that way as loads of people would download all the latest movies and watch the first half, then want to see the second half. It's a bit like shareware for software where you can try it for a bit and if you like it, pay to continue using it.
By increasing the volume of sales significantly they could trim their prices to a point where piracy would become pointless.
Anytime a product is expensive to obtain there will always be people trying to sell cheap versions because there is a margin for profit in it, the only way to avoid this is to remove the margin or make it so small it's not worth it.

When Google adwords go bad

I like the idea of Google adwords being displayed in line with the content on a webpage but sometimes Google kinda misses the point a bit.
Here's a site
http://thesurrealist.co.uk/
with loads of strange text generators, the google ads displayed are for the other kind of generator.
Anywho! - there's a link to yer site mate - since yer probably gettin nowt from yer ads.

Interesting issue on digg.com - attack of the buriers

Someone posted a link to some information which happened to be on my website (I saw my counter whiz round and checked the access logs to see what was going on)
The story is here:
http://digg.com/technology/How_to_hack_a_Coca_Cola_machine
It picked up a lot of votes quickly and was well on it's way to the front page when it vanished.
By searching for it I found it had been buried.
I realise that the information is something that has been around for a while and probably on digg in the dim and distant past however the fact that it was picking up so many diggs shows that there were still a lot of people who didn't know about it.
In essence, a relatively small group of people who already knew about it had the story buried which denied many others from reading the information.
Is this in line with the ethos of digg.com?, where a small number of users govern what the rest of the users get to see?
Maybe it's a bit of a conspiracy theory but what's to stop a group of people getting together and performing a manual "denial of service" attack on stories not in their interest?

Phil