Digg This! 55,500 hits in ~4 Days

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(this post was last updated at 10:30am EST, July 3, ‘06, GMT +5)

This post is a follow up to the previous post For Great Justice, Take Off Every Digg

According to Alexa.com, the total penetration of the Wikipedia 3.0 article was ~2 million readers (who must have read it on other websites that copied the article)

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EDIT: I looked at the graph and did the math again, and as far as I can tell it’s “55,500 in ~4 days” not “55,000 in 5 days.” So that’s 13,875 page views per each day.

Stats (approx.) for the “Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?” and “For Great Justice, Take Off Every Digg“ articles:

These are to the best of my memory from each of the first ~4 days as verified by the graph.

33,000 page views in day 1 (the first wave)

* day 1 is almost one and a half columns on the graph not one because I posted it at ~5:00am and the day (in WordPress time zone) ends at 8pm, so the first column is only ~ 15 hours.

9,500 page views in day 2

5,000 page views in day 3

8,000 page views in day 4 (the second wave)

Total: 55,500 in ~4 days which is 13,875 page views per day (not server hits) for ~4 days. Now on the 7th day the traffic is expected to be ~1000 page views, unless I get another small spike. That’s a pretty good double-dipping long tail. If you’ve done better with digg let me know how you did it! :)

Experiment

This post is a follow-up to my previous article on digg, where I explained how I had experimented and succeeded in generating 45,000 visits to an article I wrote in the first 3 days of its release (40,000 of which came directly from digg.)

I had posted an article on digg about a bold but well-thought out vision of the future, involving Google and Wikipedia, with the sensational title of “Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?” (which may turn out after all to be a realistic proposition.)

Since my previous article on digg I’ve found out that digg did not ban my IP address. They had deleted my account due to multiple submissions. So I was able to get back with a new user account and try another the experiment: I submitted “AI Matrix vs Google” and “Web 3.0 vs Google” as two separate links for one article (which has since been given the final title of “Web 3.0: Basic Concepts”

Results

Neither ‘sensational’ title worked.

Analysis

I tried to rationalize what happened …

I figured that the crowd wanted a showdown between two major cults (e.g the Google fans and the Wikipedia fans) and not between Google and some hypothetical entity (e.g. AI Matrix or Web 3.0).

But then I thought about how Valleywag was able to cleverly piggyback on my “Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?” article (which had generated all the hype) with an article having the dual title of “Five Reasons Google Will Invent Real AI” on digg and “Five Reasons No One Will Replace Google” on Valleywag.

They used AI in the title and I did the same in the new experiment, so we should both get lots of diggs. They got about 1300 diggs. I got about 3. Why didn’t it work in my case?

The answer is that the crowd is not a logical animal. It’s a psychological animal. It does not make mental connections as we do as individuals (because a crowd is a randomized population that is made up of different people at different times) so it can’t react logically.

Analyzing it from the psychological frame, I concluded that it must have been the Wikipedia fans who “dugg” my original article. The Google fans did “digg” it but not in the same large percentage as the Wikipedia fans.

Valleywag gave the Google fans the relief they needed after my article with its own article in defense of Google. However, when I went at it again with “Matrix AI vs Google” and “Web 3.0 vs Google” the error I made was in not knowing that the part of the crowd that “dugg” my original article were the Wikipedia fans not the Goolge haters. In fact, Google haters are not very well represented on digg. In other words, I found out that “XYZ vs Google” will not work on digg unless XYZ has a large base of fans on digg.

Escape Velocity

The critical threshold in the digg traffic generation process is to get enough diggs quickly enough, after submitting the post, to get the post on digg’s popular page. Once the post is on digg’s popular page both sides (those who like what your post is about and those who will hate you and want to kill you for writing it) will affected by the psychlogical manipulation you design (aka the ‘wave.’) However, the majority of those who will “digg” it will be from the group that likes it. A lesser number of people will “digg” it from the group that hates it.

Double Dipping

I did have a strong second wave when I went out and explained how ridiculous the whole digg process is.

This is how the second wave was created:

I got lots of “diggs” from Wikipedia fans and traffic from both Google and Wikipedia fans for the original article.

Then I wrote a follow up on why “digg sucks” but only got 100 “diggs” for it (because all the digg fans on digg kept ‘burying’ it!) so I did not get much traffic to it from digg fans or digg haters (not that many of the latter on digg.)

The biggest traffic to it came from the bloggers and others who came to see what the all fuss was about as far as the original article. I had linked to the follow up article (on why I thought digg sucked) from the original article (i.e. like chaining magnets) so when people came to see what the fuss was all about with respect to the original article they were also told to check out the “digg sucks” article for context.

That worked! The original and second waves, which both had a long tail (see below) generated a total of 55,500 hits in ~4 days. That’s 13,875 page views a day for the first ~4 days.

Long Tail vs Sting

I know that some very observant bloggers have said that digg can only produce a sharp, short lived pulse of traffic (or a sting), as opposed to a long tail or a double-dipping long tail, as in my case, but those observations are for posts that are not themselves memes. When you have a meme you get the long tail (or an exponential decay) and when you chain memes as I did (which I guess I could have done faster as the second wave would have been much bigger) then you get a double-dipping long tail as I’m having now.

Today (which is 7 days after the original experiment) the traffic is over 800 hits so far, still on the strength of the original wave and the second wave (note that the flat like I had before the spike represents levels of traffic between ~100 to ~800, so don’t be fooled by the flatness, it’s relative to the scale of the graph.)

In other words, traffic is still going strong from the strength of the long-tail waves generated from the original post and the follow up one.

Links

1. Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?
2. For Great Justice, Take Off Every Digg
3. Unwisdom of Crowds
4. Self-Aware e-Society

Tags:
Semantic Web, Web strandards, Trends, wisdom of crowds, tagging, Startup, mass psychology, Google, cult psychology, inference, inference engine, AI, ontology, Semanticweb, Web 2.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web 3.0, Google Base, artificial intelligence, AI, Wikipedia, Wikipedia 3.0, collective consciousness, digg, censorship