Viral Media and the Power of Digg

At Pandemic Labs we pride ourselves in conducting continual industry research so that we can understand the potential benefits of the many social indexing, bookmarking, and sharing tools that have risen to prominence in Web 2.0. We refer to these sites as “peripherals” because of the way they can help spread our viral seeds across the web. We have been following some of the largest peripheral sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon for some time now, building active and respected users as well as tracking the relative success of certain stories as they filter through the social media landscape. Recently, we were fortunate to have the Metacafe seed of our “Webcam Break Up” video reach the front page of Digg. We capitalized on this opportunity in order to learn more about the power of Digg when it comes to the spread of viral media. The experiment was small, but we wanted to share our findings with you all.

Our story only lasted 64 minutes on the front page of Digg before it was buried, but in a way, that helped us define specific start and stop points for our data collection. Here’s what we found out:

Our story reached the front page at 5:40 PM on 11/7/07. At that time we had:

• 78 diggs
• 100,818 views on Metacafe

As mentioned above, we were on the front page for 64 minutes before the story was buried. At that time we had:

• 359 diggs
• 108,265 views on Metacafe.

Based on those stats, even with a video that wasn’t overwhelmingly popular (as evidenced by the bury) we can get an idea of the power of Digg in terms of driving views. In 64 minutes on Digg’s front page we received 7,447 views. That works out to just over 115 views per minute (after subtracting the baseline views/minute for the video prior to the Digg placement). Given the fact that our story was at least another ten minutes from being organically bumped from the front page, and the fact that it would still have had plenty of time on the Popular Videos page had it not been buried, we think that the conventional estimates of the power of Digg are too conservative. With more time on the front page and the staying power of popular stories, it seems clear that getting on Digg’s front page can drive a good deal more than the 10,000 views often estimated on many blogs. This brief experience on Digg’s front page is a concrete illustration of the power of Digg when it comes to the spread of social media. Pandemic Labs will continue to produce seed and track videos for clients and for our own research. As we deepen our understanding of social media sites through our continued use of Digg and other peripherals, we will be sure to share our data and conclusions with you.

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