Been Sphunn: The Aftermath
While looking through my analytics last night, I happened to notice a small spike in traffic from Sphinn, the new social media site for the Search (and related) community. It turns out that a story I submitted, ‘What’s The Weirdest Thing You Rank For‘ went host on July 14th.
Now I’ve also been dugg in the last few weeks for a post I wrote about Dreamhost leaking 3500 passwords, so I thought I would quickly examine how the traffic from each spike. Sphinn is on the left, Digg is on the right:
So as you can see, the spike from Digg is much larger than that from Sphinn, approximately 400X as large. However, I find that I am much happier with the 40-visitor Sphinn than the 17,000-person Digg.
The 40-person Sphinn holds more value to me due to the demographics of the site. While Digg has a very general, mixed demographic, Sphinn is browsed by some of the top people in the search industry - the direct demographic this blog is meant for. Since this blog is about branding (and venting!) more than trying to make a sale, I value it being read by Sphinners more than by Diggers. In my mind, each Sphinner is a potential contact, contract, or partner. Each Digger is just another person, sucking my bandwidth for 20 seconds.
Also, I noticed that each digger spent an average of only 17 seconds on this site. Each Sphinner spent an average of a minute and a half. I will leave you to your own conclusions over which group is more valuable.
So there you have it - I think being Sphunn is great. I guess I have to start blogging regularly again. And yes, I know I’ve said that before…
I’d love to see what all of those Diggers are doing to exit those pages so quick. Could that be because there are so many bots out there trying to ramp up clicks on Digg articles and they only stay on the page for a few seconds? Maybe it’s some other reason but I really think it’s bots. They would be made to look like humans so I don’t know how you could test for that.
The bottom line for someone like me who does internet sales and marketing would be conversions. From this data I would expect a higher conversion rate from Sphinn.
Good Stuff Fellow Pipe Smoker
~B
Thanks for the comment, Biff.
I’m surprised you still read my blog after all this time!
It’ll be interesting to see what the ’sphinn’ effect is a couple of months down the line. It would be nice if going popular there could send a couple of hundred visitors and a handfull of RSS subscribers.
For the average SEO blog that would be a lot more valuable.