If you did not notice all of my sites including this blog were running VERY slow yesterday. The reason for this is the Samsung SyncMaster 940UX 19-inch LCD monitor review made it to the front page of Digg, so we were overcome with traffic. Now before we were able to handle a Digg just fine, but there were obvious reasons why we were slowed down so much. First the addition of ThinkCE, ThinkGaming, and this blog. They are all run on databases. Next the ThinkComputers page has been changed since the last Digg. There are a lot of database calls on the page including all of the ads, random photos from the gallery, blog listings, and the latest forum posts. After I disabled most of these things the page seemed to load a lot faster.
The page wouldn’t load for a good 2 hours I would say. That’s a lot of lost revenue! I guess I thought since last time we got a Digg there were no problems there would not be this time. Next time I go for a front page Digg I will be sure to disable the database calls and now I have the ads in cache mode so they don’t have to go to the database every time the page is loaded.
How Did it Make the Front Page?
Yes I was the person that submitted it to Digg. As I have said before I rarely submit things to Digg, mainly because most of the things we review at ThinkComputers have already been reviewed on other sites and they are not extraordinary products. The Samsung SyncMaster 940UX 19-inch LCD monitor has 1 very unique thing about it, you can hook it up to your PC via USB, without the use of a video card. This unique feature was why I submitted it to Digg.
A lot of other people thought it was very unique too. Within 30 minutes we already had 25 diggs, which was a real surprise to me. About 40 minutes after that we were on the front page. It has to be fastest Digg that I submitted to make it to the front page. Usually it takes 3-4 hours to make it. The Digg was well received too, there were not a lot of bad comments and as of right now it is at 1159 diggs. Yesterday it made the top 10 stories in technology and it is still on the Top in 24hr page at #3.
Traffic and Revenue
Because of the front page, and those 2 other listings there was a ton of traffic to the site. Yesterday we had about 31,000 unique visitors to the site and got around 50,000 page views, that’s quite a boost from our normal traffic. Of course with that much traffic our revenue increased. Here is a break down of revenue compared to our average revenue per day.
Google Adsense: $155.44 / $30 (Average)
TTZ Media: $160.50 / $30 (Average)
Contexual Ads: $175 / $17 (Average)
Tribal Fusion: $37.29 / $7 (Average)
Total: $528.23 / $84 (Average)
So making $528.23 instead of the usual $84 is a nice increase for sure! At that is only for yesterday the first day it hit Digg. The front page Digg and listings on other popular pages on the site will bring residual traffic to the site all this week and even longer. I still get a lot of hits from prior diggs. The Digg will help revenue for the next 3 days, as today I am already over my average earnings for the day.
How to Capitalize?
There are few things you want to do to capitalize on a front page digg. The first being making sure your server can handle it. Imagine if my site would have went down all day, I would have not made anywhere near close to what I made. Also people would see that it was down and not come back. You also want to have the right ads setup, this means if it is a review make sure you have a matching shopping link. Finally before you can even get a Digg you need to know that what you are submitting is unique, if it isn’t it will be removed from the front page and people will bury it as spam.
Yesterday was quite a success for me, hopefully I will be able to get another front page Digg soon!