I run another blog which a friend and I use to share viral videos online with, it’s called VideoExperiment.com. In the past I’ve submitted many items to Digg, but haven’t had any luck getting it onto the front page. From what I’ve heard, 60% of the material that makes it to the front is submitted by the top 5% of users, so that makes it even harder to get content up there.

Jason found a hidden gem video in a forum, which we submitted to Digg, and it hit the front page. A video isn’t the same as an article, but it still brings a generous amount of traffic to the site. The video was about a car with 30″ wheels that went to the drag strip, the axle broke, and the wheel continued down the track without the car.

Being Dugg is a great way to get a kick start on your site. You’ve gotta get it in front eyeballs in order for people to keep coming back, right? So what happened with VE after being Dugg?

Traffic

We have to keep in mind we really don’t work on generating traffic, so we were getting an average of 20 unique visitors and 36 pageviews a day. The day we got Dugg we generated 7,818 uniques and 8,865 pageviews. From the day that we got Dugg (Tuesday) through Sunday we generated 15,345 uniques and 17,517 pageviews. We also got a good amount of comments on videos where we normally don’t get comments. The amount of traffic has drastically come down, but we hope to retain some visitors as a result of the Digging. We also generated a ton of new backlinks, which should help us out with SEO, an important part of building traffic on that blog. This also obviously generated more traffic than just Digg.

RSS Subscribers

The RSS subscribers jumped up from an average of around 7-11 to 123 the next day. It has since come down to around the 30 range, but still much better than before! We’ll continue to watch the numbers and see if things keep coming down or level off higher than they were previously.

Monetization

We are only using Google AdSense ads on the site, and were only making a couple dollars a month from those. Digg readers are notorious for not clicking ads, or even having some sort of ad blocker, so I wasn’t expecting much out of this. All-in-all the traffic brought in around $11, enough to almost cover the hosting expenses! Again, we’re not really concerned about the money stuff yet, it’s more about building some retained traffic.

Have you ever been Dugg? How have your experiences been? I’m more interested in seeing how things are a couple weeks, or even months afterwards.