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Are Digg Editors Manually Promoting Stories at Night?
Posted by Scott on 25th October, 2007 | 10 commentsMost everyone should be familiar with Digg.com - if your blog post or site gets mentioned there and it makes it to the homepage, you’ll get thousands of visitors and backlinks in a flash, so it’s an important site to be aware of for any web business owner. The algortihm that Digg uses to “promote” new stories from the “upcoming” story queue to the homepage is shrouded in mystery, and it seems to work on some combination of quantity of diggs, digg rate (diggs per minute avg - too high and you’re a spammer, too low and you’re uninteresting), and digg authority (the rating of the digg users who are digging the story or who promoted the story).
During the day there is much more activity on Digg than at night. Stories get dugg continuously throughout the day and the best ones (selected by Digg’s algorithm) are promoted and appear on the homepage at regular intervals. But after about 7pm Pacific time, new stories that are sitting in the upcoming queue tend to stagnate with little activity.
I was watching the most popular stories in “upcoming” in the technology category off and on for a couple hours. Nothing was being dugg, and there hadn’t been any tech stories promoted in the past 3 hours. Then suddenly, three technology stories were promoted to the homepage within the span of 23 minutes (two from the same subcategory, Tech Industry News) even though nothing had really changed with the activity level (comments, diggs, etc) of those stories. This is a snapshot of the Technology category from 10pm on 10/24/07:
View a larger snapshot taken a few minutes later to see the bigger pattern of timestamps.
I find that behavior to be very strange. Usually Digg’s algorithm chooses stories from a category at regular intervals. Why had no stories been promoted within 3 hours, then suddenly three get promoted at once? Had their algorithm been asleep for 3 hours? Or, could it be that because there isn’t very much activity at night, there are Digg staff editors who manually choose which stories to promote when there isn’t enough user generated voting to differentiate the good from the bad? Seems plausible to me.
In any case, Digg as a marketing tool is a tough cookie to crack. It is essentially a giant popularity contest. You could submit a story to Digg saying that aliens had landed on the Whitehouse lawn (as fact), and it will get maybe 5 diggs and never be promoted to their homepage unless you are a highly rated digg user and also get hundreds of friends to come digg your story. It’s supposed to be an organic process, where good stories are dugg naturally because they are interesting, not a popularity contest. The underlying flaw in the site is that not enough people are looking at the upcoming stories queue, so all the great stories are staying hidden.
Tips for Successfully Promoted Digg Stories:
- Build up your reputation as a Digg user before promoting your own stuff. Submit interesting stories, add friends, digg lots of stuff, write lots of comments.
- Post your story at about 6am Pacific Time.
- Make sure you use a catchy title and description. “Tips for Success” is bad. “25 Undiscovered Secrets of Success” is better.
- Better have a lot of friends because you’re unlikely to get a story promoted unless you ask a lot of friends to digg it.
- Never attempt fraud like creating multiple accounts.
- Better yet, try other social networks instead like Stumbleupon, Reddit, Propeller.
Great tips from SEOmoz on promoting Digg stories successfully:
Popularity: 21%
Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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I noticed that too, the story at the top of your screenshot is mine and (while frantically refreshing) got a little frustrated at the sudden drop of diggs, although it did eventually make it to page 1.
It is only my 2nd submission so I have a 50/50 success ratio
So much for building up a respected profile!
I noticed that you had quite a few diggs for one of your stories yesterday, did it bring much traffic?
Yeah it had like 80 diggs and was at the top of the most popular upcoming stories in tech but it just sat there for like 4 hours and never hit the homepage. Traffic from upcoming is very low, I got like 30 users from it. No idea why it didn’t get promoted though.
On other digg-like sites, I have even saw way less visitors than votes, meaning either that most of the user vote without looking at my content or that there’s something going on to make it look like there’s more voting activity than there really is.
Interesting analysis Scott!
the thing that I really dont understand about digg is how come some articles need like 200 diggs to get on the front page and some need only like 20, sure beats my brain
“how come some articles need like 200 diggs to get on the front page and some need only like 20, sure beats my brain”
It’s because they take a lot of factors into account, not just total diggs. I think the rate of diggs is very important: if something has 30 diggs over 3 hours it’s a lot hotter than getting even twice that many diggs over 20 hours.
While the numbers of Diggs per submission is typically the most publicly visible statistic in the ranking process, the rate of Diggs per submission is exceedingly important IMO, as noted by Scott in his above comments.
When submitting content to Digg, it is ideal to have a Digg strategy (friends, forum, etc.) in place to generate a steady pace of Diggs within the first one to two hours of submission. A sustained initial Digg rate can also serve to generate external interest, thus hopefully leading to increased click throughs and Digg feedback.
I actually just started using digg recently and digg became my number one source of referrals within a week. I would like to become a digg power user so that I can get posted on the front page too. Thanks to the other commentators for your good ideas too.
Um yeah, it’s called time difference. Not everyone lives in America my friend.
Nice video.. Very interesting.. =0