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The Telegraph: how to pick up traffic from Digg
February 12, 2009
The Telegraph recently ran an excellent story that included our recent Twitter data. While reading the article I noticed the Digg widget illustrated in the picture below on the newspaper’s homepage. Launched last October it lists the most ‘dugg’ Telegraph stories, with links to their Digg entries
Many (arguably most) news and media websites now include social bookmarking buttons, which allow users to add their favourite stories to sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Facebook, but the Telegraph’s widget takes things a little further. Given the high profile it has on the site, the Telegraph has become one of Digg’s largest sources of traffic in the UK.
However, the real test of how successful the widget has been is to look at the amount of traffic that Digg sends to the Telegraph. In addition to providing a version of the ‘most read stories’ section included on most news sites, the Digg widget also encourages Telegraph readers to ‘digg’ their favourite stories. This in turn helps Telegraph stories to move up the Digg rankings, meaning that more should reach the front page. Looking at the Hitwise data, the strategy seems to have worked. As the chart below illustrates, the amount of downstream traffic that Digg sends to the Telegraph has increased significantly over the last 12 months.
The Telegraph has now overtaken the Daily Mail and BBC News to become the largest UK recipient of traffic from Digg. However, aside from these three, UK sites are under-represented in the list of top News and Media sites receiving traffic from Digg in the table below. The remaining seven are all American, with US comedy site Cracked topping the list. This is perhaps to be expected: Digg has many more users in the US and the lack of local content filtering (i.e. there is no UK-specific site) means that the number of stories submitted and ‘dugg’ will skew in favour of US sources.
The experience of the Telegraph shows that Digg‘s US-bias can be overcome, but that content sites need to actively encourage their readers to use the service in order to achieve this. This strategy can also have an impact on international traffic too: last week the Telegraph was also the second most visited News and Media site in after Digg in the US as well as the UK.
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Posted by Robin Goad at 10:00 AM
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In Categories BBC | News and Media | Social networks
Comments
Just goes to show what can be achieved when you create content with social media in mind. Both the Telegraph and Mail have done this very well and lead the way amongst UK news sites.
Posted by Adi | February 12, 2009 03:04 PM
I noticed that HP were offering a 10% discount in return for tagging the page with any of the popular bookmarking services, call me sceptical but I have a feeling that the e-voucher is already active,
"Enter e-voucher HPSHARE to your shopping basket and Save 10%. This e-voucher will activate once page has been tagged."
Getting tags to your page can be challenging if your not a large org with already high levels of traffic, but offering a bribe... Without current access to Hitwise, I would love to know if this has worked (on a side note it does show another value to Hitwise!)
Posted by Gerry | February 13, 2009 09:59 AM
Thanks. Now I can feel even more guilty for failing to have a Digg strategy for my videos and blog. Honestly, I feel like begging for a Digg is so desperate. If the peeps think it's digg worthy, won't they do it on their own? Probably not.
Posted by nalts | February 13, 2009 09:37 PM
I would also hasten to add that The Telegraph has I believe the most gravitas when reporting. Not many neo Marxists would say that.
Posted by Charles Frith | February 15, 2009 04:28 PM
The Telegraph has driven this Digg traffic using its widget.
But the Times has dominated newspaper's StumbleUpon mentions without even having a StumbeUpon logo in its 'sharing' list.
Posted by malcolm | February 25, 2009 07:43 PM
That is really some powerful data. The telegraph is certainly using Digg to every advantage. I noticed that twitter is very much celebrity orientated and a popular way for people to get on board with their favorite high profile people. Thanks for sharing that. I'll try to be more proactive with social networking and bookmarking.
Posted by seo | November 28, 2009 01:17 PM
However, the real test of how successful the widget has been is to look at the amount of traffic that Digg sends to the Telegraph.
Posted by cara meninggikan badan | May 5, 2010 07:40 AM
Just goes to show what can be achieved when you create content with social media in mind. Both the Telegraph and Mail have done this very well and lead the way amongst UK news sites.
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That goes to show that digg is pretty dam powerful. Thats some mighty fine growth right there!
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I noticed that twitter is very much celebrity orientated and a popular way for people to get on board with their favorite high profile people. Thanks for sharing that. I'll try to be more proactive with social networking and bookmarking.
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Posted by Chanel Handbags | January 24, 2011 09:40 AM
it is normal trend many news and media websites now include social bookmarking buttons. We can see that it allows users to add their favourite stories to sites like facebook, Digg etc.. This also helps to increase the traffic for the websites.
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Posted by opad | April 22, 2011 08:27 AM
Time to get some effort put into Digg. Twitter and Facebook and now Google + are increasingly taking all the effort.
Posted by eCommerce | September 5, 2011 02:47 PM
I actually hate it when I see Digg buttons embedded on an actual post. It makes me feel like they are abusing the system. It used to be that you could submit a good story to digg and if 20 people found it interesting, it'd get promoted. Now because of things like this, it takes over 100 diggs for a story to reach the front page. If you happen to be a top digger with a ton of friends or own a mainstream media publication where you can send a firehose of traffic to that digg this button, it allows them to get sub-par articles on the site, instead of legitimate viral stories that tend to so much better. I understand that this is a common practice and that encouraging Diggs does good things for people's traffic, but the whole thing still seems a little heavy handed to me.
Posted by Davis Freeberg | February 12, 2009 02:21 PM