Why Digg is bad for your blog
If your site is advertising supported getting Dugg to the home page hurts you!
"But, how can all that traffic hurt," you ask? Simple. Because Diggers do not click on advertising you will find your "click-through" ratio (or CTR) drops into the decimal range. The CTR is a prime factor in getting paid by the company who puts advertising on your blog. If you have a high CTR you get more money and better ads showing up on your site. If your CTR drops very low you will find the money drops with it.
"I've been using Google AdSense for well over a year now, even before I had a blog. In that time I've seen my revenue numbers fluctuate highly based on CTR. There was one day where I only had about 35 impressions but 1 click. This resulted in about $6.00 in advertising that day and a rate of $200 per 1K impressions! It would have been nice to see the impressions run up to the roof that day...
Another day I had 12K impressions but only 45 clicks. This resulted in about $0.12 in revenue.
I do not know how AdSense figures out what rates to pay it's members but what I have learned is that you are much better off with a small number of visitors who click on advertising links then a large number of visitors who don't click on advertising links.
During the recent front page hit on Digg I tried to log in on an hourly basis to both my web server and Google AdSense to see how my numbers looked. It's just terrible to see thousands of hits coming in and at the same time seeing your expected revenue drop.
It's also highly irritating to look at the ads that are attached to your Dugg article and see that they have zero relation to it.
I'm not going to worry about getting "front paged" on Digg anymore and instead I'm just going to go back to focusing on having fun and providing information that my loyal readers want to read. Blogging for money is not a good reason to blog. It's nice if the advertising helps pay the web server fees but $300 per day in advertising revenue (which I would need to quit my day job) is just not in my future!"
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