Digg Case Study

Stephen Fung’s Futurelooks recently wrote a story about the Turntable with Frickin’ Lasers. The members of Digg like the story enough to send it to the front page, resulting in quite a flood of traffic. Even though the TTZ Media shopping system didn’t have the laser turntable in the index (it’s not even on the market yet), Futurelooks was able to capitalize on the traffic by showing a “related product”, in this case, the Technics SL-1200GLD Turntable.

If you can’t find the exact product to use for an article or review, the next best thing is to show a related one. While it may not get as many clicks as an exact fit, it will get a good number. In the case of Futurelooks, while their story was on the Digg front page, the Digg users clicked the turntable price links nearly 400 times. Add in the extra income from Google and other ad networks and this Digg was worth nearly $400 in extra income.

You have to keep in mind that while Digg can send the traffic, it’s up to you to capitalize on it. Sometimes that can be hard because of the story content. I have been dugg to stories that made very little because I didn’t have any targeted offerings for the Digg users. The best case is when you can pull off a coup by getting dugg to a story with a perfectly targeted ad, like the Planon RC800 Portable Color Scanner by Think Computers. Think was able to show the exact item being reviewed. The results was over 2,000 vendor clicks while the story was on the Digg front page.