365questions.org

I started 365questions in June 2006, as an experiment in blogging.

In September 06, I hardly reached 700 visitors.

Today, at the end of April 07, after 245 posts and 390 comments, more than 98 000 visitors reached my blog.

How could this happen ?

The truth is that this blog alone didn’t attract many people. The truth is that a very small quantity of sites brought me a huge quantity of visitors.

Namely : Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Stumble Upon or non English Digg-likes like Meneame (Spanish) and Scoopeo (in French).

These sites are the behemoths of modern internet, they are the new giants, they are a rising power, soon even mightier than Google.

Let’s see why.

Someone said (actually, me):

60% of internet content is produced by users. That’s huge.

The true commodity of the internet is content, and it is produced by us. The true currency of the internet is traffic, and that’s where we need sites like Google, Youtube and Digg.

1/ Google and the invention of Popularity :

Google introduced one revolution: Page Rank. Page Rank made Google superior by bringing the most popular sites for a keyword, based on an algorithm that calculates the number of links to that particular site. It works well, but only when you search for something specific.

What about all the content out there that you are not actively searching for, by typing a keyword in a search engine ?

2/ Blogs or Publishing for the masses:

Weblogs democratized Web publication.

Blogs started the explosion of contents and it became difficult to follow information, evolutions, to keep on top of things that matter. All things-web in particular became too hard to grasp. Too much innovation, too many new concepts.

3/ Bookmarks gone “social”:

This is where Social bookmarking comes in: instead of you looking for something, Social bookmarking sites allow information to “bubble up” in an organized way.

Delicious introduced what I would call “aggregated Popularity”. People started “tagging” the Web, and sharing their tags, for the greatest profit of all. The “Popular” page of Del.icio.us (the most bookmarked pages) soon became the best source of tech news for many of us. A kind of real time photography of what it is necessary to read.

4/ And now, Digg.

What is Digg? A bunch of geeks cruising the internet to post the article or video that will hit the home page.

I could stare at Digg spy for hours, watching all the new contributions fall in with the same regularity as the green signs of the Matrix. More than 5000 stories posted every day. It would take a single blogger years to blog all this…

With more than 1 Million registered users and 20+ millions visitors a month, Digg is a traffic driving machine : when a post reaches the home page, it’s a sudden rush. Many small sites won’t resist it : a DNS attack ? no, just the Digg effect.

The second Digg effect is when smaller sites and blogs relay your post. The most interesting is Stumble Upon (recently bought by eBay), where users rate your page directly from a browser bar, hereby suggesting it to other users, who will in turn “stumble upon” it.

Let’s look at my numbers :

In 2007, from 75 434 visitors, Digg generated 33 % of my traffic, with 25 000 visitors (with only one page dugg). Google provided me with 16 600 visitors, also called “organic traffic”. Then come Stumble Upon with 12 800 visitors and Reddit with 4 375.

Now what’s so important about that : traffic means awareness, and awareness means money. Being on Digg homepage means exposing your site to 50 000 people in a few days, for free.

Media websites, who rely on ads for their income, and any e-business whatsoever, are craving for traffic. Traffic is gold and Digg has the formula to create it.

Now everybody want their own user-powered news site : Yahoo bookmarks, Netscape, Technorati with WTF - and recently Myspace with Myspace news.

The problem is, the place is now quite crowded : every one can have their own little Digg with open source projects such as Pligg or PhpDug.

Personally I like the German Digg for products : Itotallyloveit.

OK, that’s all I had to say today. If that was no news for you, you can post “Duh” in the comments, I’ll appreciate.

It’s time to go back to my little blogging experience, and find some good stuff to share with the world.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 11:37 pm and is filed under Web 2.0, Blogging, Real Questions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.