Archive for the 'digg.com' Category

Been Sphunn: The Aftermath

While looking through my analytics last night, I happened to notice a small spike in traffic from Sphinn, the new social media site for the Search (and related) community. It turns out that a story I submitted, ‘What’s The Weirdest Thing You Rank For‘ went host on July 14th.

Now I’ve also been dugg in the last few weeks for a post I wrote about Dreamhost leaking 3500 passwords, so I thought I would quickly examine how the traffic from each spike. Sphinn is on the left, Digg is on the right:

Sphinn traffic spikeDigg Traffic Spike

So as you can see, the spike from Digg is much larger than that from Sphinn, approximately 400X as large. However, I find that I am much happier with the 40-visitor Sphinn than the 17,000-person Digg.

The 40-person Sphinn holds more value to me due to the demographics of the site. While Digg has a very general, mixed demographic, Sphinn is browsed by some of the top people in the search industry - the direct demographic this blog is meant for. Since this blog is about branding (and venting!) more than trying to make a sale, I value it being read by Sphinners more than by Diggers. In my mind, each Sphinner is a potential contact, contract, or partner. Each Digger is just another person, sucking my bandwidth for 20 seconds.

Also, I noticed that each digger spent an average of only 17 seconds on this site. Each Sphinner spent an average of a minute and a half. I will leave you to your own conclusions over which group is more valuable.

So there you have it - I think being Sphunn is great. I guess I have to start blogging regularly again. And yes, I know I’ve said that before…

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