After the digg
I’ve seen a lot of articles about the Digg Effect and what a site can expect after having a bunch of new visitors arrive to check out an article, as happened with my recent post on Warcraft.
The general prediction is that readership drops to normal levels pretty quickly, and that’s borne out by the stats.
Page views are a little higher post-Digg, but it’s nothing like the giant spike that happened in the middle of the Digg storm. Most of the people who clicked through were following a story about Warcraft; most of them weren’t screenwriters. (Living in Los Angeles, it’s easy to forget that there are some people in this big world who haven’t written a script.)
On a somewhat-related note, I’ve upgraded to the most recent WordPress, and the site seems to be running a little faster for it.
Articles
March 1st, 2007 at 11:48 am
Your first scene challenge seems to have bumped the traffic a bit, futzing the data.
I like data. I am a dork
March 1st, 2007 at 12:30 pm
I got here from the same story as everyone else (but from WoW-Insider); but I’ve just started my first year of uni, a prequel to doing a degree in Fine Arts, majoring in film – so I find this site quite exiciting!
I’m one of (what looks like) 500 new permentant visiors to the site.
How’s it going, y’all?
March 1st, 2007 at 4:36 pm
I actually got here through TotalFark. Your WoW post was submitted to Fark but not greenlit. I came, saw that you were a screenwriter, said to myself “This is relevant to my interests,” and bookmarked your blog.
It is a mighty fine blog.
March 1st, 2007 at 5:19 pm
The opposite is true for me. Few people know I’ve ever written a screenplay. They’d laugh me out of my small Texas town.
March 1st, 2007 at 7:38 pm
I’ve been getting the same effect through StumbleUpon.com… Go figure.
Unk
March 1st, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Uh, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Digg factor…but I live in the Land-that-time-Forgot, Wyoming, and was just now searching Rotten Tomatoes for any new information regarding The Nines.
I quite literally (and simultaneously) inhaled up my nose and spit at my laptop screen the Riesling I was drinking when I saw that your film is “100% Fresh.”
Holy, holy. I’ve never seen that before! Now I don’t consider myself a film snob, but I do consider myself a discerning film buff; and 100% fresh I have NEVER. SEEN. BEFORE.
Well done, JA.
March 1st, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Unk, if your site gets popular on any of the social content websites (del.icio.us, digg, reddit, stumbleupon, etc.) you will experience these type of results, but it seems as though Digg drives the most traffic.
While getting on the front page of Digg is exciting, the residual effects aren’t outstanding. I’m sure getting 20,000 hits in one day does rock though.
March 1st, 2007 at 9:43 pm
dex: 100% fresh I have NEVER. SEEN. BEFORE.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/toy_story/
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/toystory2/
I’m not aware of any others.
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:16 am
Ahhh… to suffer from the digg effect is still a fantasy of mine.
Isaac
March 2nd, 2007 at 5:53 am
The exact same thing happens when you get a link on Fark. Last time, my site got over 70,000 visitors by lunch — then the server went down (the bit got a “boobies” tag which is way better than “amusing”). You think you’ve hit the big time — and then your traffic goes right back to normal.
I used to think that the farkers were all mindless sheep but maybe they just give themselves some short amount of time at work to visit all… nah, they’re just sheep.
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:54 am
100% on RT is pretty cool. Can’t wait to see The Nines. I think Pan’s Labyrinth was at 100% fresh a while back, but checking now it is at 96%.
March 2nd, 2007 at 8:21 am
In fairness, there are very few reviews of The Nines up. Once there are a few more, we won’t be at 100%. I’m hoping we still stay “Fresh.”
March 2nd, 2007 at 11:04 am
Fairness, shmairness. ;)
March 3rd, 2007 at 8:47 am
Depending on when you updated Wordpress, you may be running a vulnerable copy.
Apparently, some sort of exploit was appended to the code behind Wordpress that allows remote PHP execution and if you installed a version that was released on March 1st(the timestamp of this article) or anytime prior, it is possibly vulnerable.
http://wordpress.org/development/2007/03/upgrade-212/
-terry
March 3rd, 2007 at 10:11 pm
What’s the scale on the graph? Is the topmost notch 30,000?
Also, if you like website stats, Alexa.com is a facinating site. Click on the “Traffic Ranks” tab at the top, then type in johnaugust.com to get your ranking.
March 4th, 2007 at 10:11 am
Thanks, Terry (#14), for the heads-up. I’ve already upgraded.
March 4th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
John, can you by any chance get your buddy Friedma to give us some more posts! He should follow your output volume!
March 5th, 2007 at 1:07 am
Well, John, now that you have a few Digg users on board, perhaps you can share your thoughts on piracy from a working writer/director’s point of view. It’s a pretty hot topic on Digg, and by hot I mean RIAA/MPAA stories hit the front page nearly every other day, and a great many Digg users are pro-piracy.