Slashdot Still Rules

I’ve made a quite a few posts about Digg and its effect on site revenue. Much has been written about Digg’s amazing rise to the top of the Web 2.0 world. In less than two years, Digg has done what seemed impossible at the time – they’ve dethroned Slashdot as the biggest tech news site on the net. Be that as it may however, I’m here to tell you that from a webmaster’s standpoint, Slashdot still rules.

While Digg now gets up to twice the traffic of Slashdot, Slashdot will still send you more traffic if you get a story on their front page. The reason for this is simple. Digg has hundreds of stories travel through their front page everyday. Slashdot has just a dozen or so. That means a Slashdot story stays on the front page a lot longer – sometimes more than a full day. Depending on how fast Digg is moving, a Dugg story can fall off the front page within 4 hours.

The difference in income can be quite large. A Digg means up to $500 of extra income. However, I had received Slashdot that has impacted The TechZone and affiliated sites to tune of thousands of dollars. Targeting has a lot to do with the income level of course, but the number one factor for a Digg or Slashdot is how long the story stays on the front page – the longer it’s there, the more money you make. And unless Digg get Supergiant big, or the submitted stories suddenly slow down to a snail’s pace, a story on Slashdot will continue to have a bigger impact on the bottom line than Digg.

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