Why StumbleUpon is better than Digg

Before I go on my observations between digg and stumbleupon let me just say that I am happy with digg and stumbleupon equally, as a user. This is just a numbers crunch that explains on paper why traffic referrals from stumbleupon are better for your site than numbers from digg, in the long run.

Back, which seems so many moons ago, I ran a small podcast called the techphile podcast, which from time to time, received its fair share of traffic. After doing some serious data mining from the logs of the old podcast and from this site there seems to be some clear patterns that form with regards to traffic that is referred from both digg and stumble upon. Lets break this down and take a look.

Traffic

August of last year I had Kevin and Alex from Diggnation on the podcast, the story was quickly dugg to the front page of digg, which brought some insane traffic to the site.

Day 1 – Digg, 6,800 hits, StumbleUpon 143
Day 2 – Digg 11,340 hits, StumbleUpon 221
Day 3 – Digg 4,832 hits, StumbleUpon 289
Day 4 – Digg 132 hits, StumbleUpon 498
Day 5 – Digg 31 hits, StumbleUpon 732
Day 6 – Digg 0 hits, StumbleUpon 1184
Day 7 – Digg 0 hits, StumbleUpon 2132
Day 8 – Digg 0 hits, StumbleUpon 1932

You can clearly see the pattern. Digg will bring you an insane amount of traffic right off the bat, and probably kill your server like it did mine. StumbleUpon will lessen the load off the bat and spread the traffic over time.

Bounce Rate

This is the butter that makes StumbleUpon sooo smooth. Digg users generally crawl digg’s frontpage looking for stories. StumbleUpon’s users crawl looking for interesting sites. This translates into repeat users, which for a blog is a lot better than a single hit on a single story. Think of it as a target focus. SU users are looking for fun and interesting sites. Digg users are looking to read a static page. I much prefer having people land on the site looking for something new as opposed to someone hammering the site for a specific story.

Remember, I’m a heavy digg user; the experience is great, but as the managing editor of a blog looking to generate traffic. Static traffic is great but if we can keep people coming back that’s even better. StumbleUpon wins this round!

Frank's the editor in chief of tech.nocr.at. He can be found surfing the internet and playing with gadgets. Follow him on twitter @franklinhares