Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon Exchange Networks; What’s The Point?
I've gone through many stages over my time on the internets. I've been hooked on IRC, forums, social news, and SEO websites. However after years of experiencing all of those things, I seem to do an equal mixture of all of the above. However, it still amuses me that members of Digital Point's forums think getting on a social news website means instant success. Members there have created all sorts of lame website attempting to get traffic from social news websites. What's even sadder is these sites are actually popular. Stumble exchange has gamed a whopping 20,000 fake stumbles, boasting 549 members. Since Digg is the website I'm most familiar with, let's take a look at their Digg exchange website.
How it works
When you login, you're shown a list of websites that are awaiting to be submitted to Digg. Most of them are spammy sites, with no content. Basically people are just giving their homepage with random things on it. I don't think most people that use this service understand the concept of Digg, or any other socially driven website. Anyways, you can then click a link which uses a web based proxy to submit the website to Digg with a pre-filled in title. The title is chosen by the user in their profile. I'm not for sure, but I think the proxy is so they can track what websites have been submitted, and what websites need to be Dugg.
Of course the most vital part of the website is the actual exchanging of Diggs. They start by listing 10 random websites that are pending front page, in this section. The more sites you Digg for other people, the more your "karma" goes up on their website. I see nowhere on their website suggesting that you get special treatment for higher karma, so there's really no point in dishing out Digg's. The funniest part about their website is their ToS, which states:
Please do not abuse the system by exchanging diggs with any site you come across as this will decrease the quality of the sites on Digg.com, which is NOT something we are aiming to do. Our aim at diggXchange is to allow tracking of who have dugg your sites, and to give an additional push to outstanding websites by introducing it to our specifically webmaster related community.
So how can Digg stop it?
Quite easily, this site is honestly a complete failure. A necessary part to the website, is listing all of the Digg submissions in queue that need to be Dugg. However, this is quite frankly their biggest weakness. Any Digg administrator can come along any time of the day, and ban each domain on that website. The exchance website tries to combat that by randomizing which sites they show, but a few reloads proves effective in getting them all.
How can their website be effective?
That's going to be a hard task. If you're forced to display the URLs in which people are supposed to Digg, the only solution is private registrations. Quite simply, you need enough people that you can trust. However, eventually people will notice the same 20 users Digging the same people's stories over and over. Sites like these are really fighting an uphill battle.
Why even bother?
That's actually a legitimate question. Social news sites in general bring floods of visitors, that click and leave. Sure you get thousands of unique visitors, but it's not quality traffic. First of all, my website makes a decent amount of money with steady traffic from Google. I maintain a moderate click through rate on advertisements. If I ever get a large spike of traffic from social news, it destroys my CTR. We're talking about less than 1% total. So really you're not making money of these visitors. Along with lack of money, you'll not likely get any dedicated readers. For instance, if you take the most five most popular stories listed on social news websites that I've had, you'd have a number around 250 thousand unique visitors. Keeping in mind I've been on Digg around 20 times or so, I now have 500 RSS readers. In perspective, if you got 10,000 unique hits from being on Digg, you'd probably only get a handful of RSS readers.
The only good part of getting large traffic spikes is other websites will link to you. However, this is of course never a guarantee. Your content has to be superb to get large amounts of link backs. However, I've made posts that received literally hundreds of tracebacks from blogs alone.
Summary
Websites like these are pretty pointless. They use techniques that are easy to combat, and are effectively being shot down. Even if you make it on a social news website, the quality of traffic you're going to get is sub par. You're almost guaranteed not to make more than $20, and not get more than a handful of readers.
I'm pretty sure that image from their website summarizes it best. A large spike in traffic that evaporates in a day.
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9:33 PM on November 25th, 2007
The digg and stumble exchanges are quite effective in getting traffic to any (even inferior) websites. And making 20$ a day by driving huge amounts of digg and stumble traffic is not that bad. This method is good for getting quick profits, but not for establishing a long lasting relationship with the readers.
2:29 PM on December 1st, 2007
I disagree that it is pointless. If you have started a new website or blog and need to get an initial surge of interest it can be quite helpful. Sure not many people will actually come back to visit, but even 15-20 subscribers can be a huge boost for a writer.
However, I do dislike the digg scams much more. They really are more about making things “digg-worthy”
7:28 PM on January 7th, 2008
I have found Stumble traffic to be not quite as useless as you have. That may reflect the differences in content/visitors of our websites or possibly the difference in where we appear in Google results. A large surge in Stumble traffic usually results in an improvement in my CTR. On the other hand, the sort of reader who visits my site rarely even sees ads. I don’t do it for the money… I just want to make enough to cover my hosting costs :)
I did find that several of the stumblers added me as a friend or even a fan on stumbleupon and have become regular readers.
I haven’t yet seen a surge in Digg or Delicious traffic so I can’t comment on those.
5:06 PM on April 17th, 2008
StumbleUpon exchange in any way breaches SU’s terms of service. Also, exchangers and mass spammers are well known for their spam bomb attacks and anonymous threats to users who complain.
It pisses people off, too.
9:29 PM on June 1st, 2008
The main problem with these exchange networks (like you say) is that they are mostly full of spam content. However, I think if it wasn’t against these sites terms and was used sensibly then it would be useful. However this isn’t a perfect world and I would rather generally keep away from this sort of thing.