Why All the Diggs?

 As many of you have noticed, First Page Fitness has devoted a few blog posts to Digg.com issues. Call it a ploy, call it Digg spamming, call it what you will. But the point is, Digg.com as an internet phenomenon is very interesting to us. We wanted to know how many people on there are generally interested health and fitness news, which is why we decided to do some ”digging” into the types of stories that top diggers are interested in. We wanted to know if those people actually stuck around after visiting a site from Digg.com, or if they clicked-and-split, as many have suggested. Is it worth the time for our clients to submit their health and fitness news stories to Digg.com? Should they even bother signing up? 

Although we had no idea that our stories (which were written out of general interest in Digg.com) would make it to the top page of Digg, they did and now we were able to answer a few of these questions. Some of them were considered “common knowledge” but we are never satisfied with knowledge related to helping our clients until we find out for ourselves. Here is what we have concluded: 

Health and fitness news is generally not big news on Digg.com unless is has to do with some breakthrough or medical device. 

Digg.com users do not stick around very long. The average time spent on our website (stickiness) drop dramatically on a per-user basis, as did the amount of pages viewed per visitor. 

Digg.com commentators are rude. Do not submit your story to Digg.com unless you are willing to put up with a bit of bad press from people who make it their life’s mission to put down other people. We all know a few people like that, but thought they grew out of it after high-school. 

Would we suggest submitting your news stories to Digg.com? No, not really. The traffic does not convert very well (if at all) and the users spend too little time on your website to fully grasp what it is that you do or what message you are trying to get across. This, of course, applies to our niche and may be a completely different story for other websites. For instance, a video game e-commerce site might find Digg.com to be a very qualified source of traffic. 

Would we suggest you sign up at Digg.com? Absolutely. We have been introduced to so many new websites and so many under-reported news stories that it will take weeks to digest. It is an extremely powerful source of aggregated information, independent of any single media corporation (like Fox or Clear Channel).