Digg Traffic Has Questionable Value For Most Niche Publishers – Publishing 2.0

Digg Traffic Has Questionable Value For Most Niche Publishers – Publishing 2.0:

What I’ve just said might come as a surprise to many niche blogs and traditional media publishers who play the volume game when it comes to selling the value of their online audiences. Many tech blogs report audiences measured in shear volume, i.e. hundreds of thousands or north of 1 million, and those numbers are goosed by avalanche traffic from Digg.

The problem is that from a trade publishing ad sales perspective, there’s limited value in raw volume. Trade publishing is all about targeting and focus. Most Digg users are still in high school or college, and are therefore unlikely to have any B2B purchasing power, so they have questionable value to the B2B advertisers on many tech blogs — particular those that cover the BUSINESS of technology.

Of course, tech blogs have CORE audiences that are highly relevant to their advertisers, but the traffic from Digg adds little if anything to that value, and in fact can potentially dilute the value for publishers that sell on a CPM basis.

This is not to say that there aren’t blogs and other online publications that benefit greatly from Digg traffic — for gadget and gaming blogs, Digg traffic is hugely valuable, because Digg users are certainly interested in gadgets and games, and they probably buy them in large quantities. Some types of political stories do well on Digg, as do stories of the weird.

Scott Carp talks about the value of Digg traffic — and finds very little value to it.

This is something I talked about a while back, and came to the same conclusion:

Chuqui 3.0: does digg or reddit matter?:

Well — I’d been experimenting with a “digg this” feature on typepad. It’s gone. I see no reason to encourage those folks to come visit my blog. They generated a LOT of page views, but most of the constructive things I saw from the viewing tsunami I can attribute to reddit. Digg definitely bumped my page views, but didn’t generate traffic elsewhere on the site and (to the best of my interpretation) limited subscription increases — and definitely not increases to warrant putting up with all that other stuff.

I’d disagree with one thing Carp says — I doubt that Digg traffic is very valuable even for the niche blogs that match up with Digg demographics, because Digg traffic brings along very little EXCEPT raw page view numbers, which are a resource suck and really have no value to any site except those that still include page counters on things (haven’t we grown beyond that, folks?); Digg users don’t explore a site, they don’t subscribe to a site, they don’t click on advertising on a site. They see a link on Digg, they click through, they glance, sometimes they drop off a snide comment, rarely they’ll link to you on their site, and then they’re gone.

If you’re blogging for anything other than enjoying hearing yourself type, you’re blogging for either revenue or for a readership. Digg generates neither; the users that come across don’t subscribe to your feed, and they don’t generate advertising revenue. A store full of window shopppers may look busy, but the store’s not making money, and that crowd may well deter real shoppers from coming inside. That’s the model Digg brings to a blog. As far as I can tell, there’s no benefit to a blog by being linked to from Digg; it’s all about Digg benefitting from your blog. It doesn’t return any favors here…

I stopped encouraging Digg back in August. I haven’t missed it. And my feed numbers are up significantly without them…

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