Ben Cook, a curious blogger who runs Blogging Experiment, wondered whether the Digg effect could leave enough lasting effect for a blog to rely on for its foreseeable future. Basically, how much traffic would he continue to receive once the surge in visitors from a Digg post had dwindled away? Ben created a blog called Hilarious Names back in May and posted the first article to Digg to see what kind of results he would get.

Well, after receiving about 20,000 visitors within a few hours, things died down to about 1,000 a day and then to 10 a day. He decided to take a look at the blog’s stats again recently and found that it still receives 40-50 visitors a day and is the top result of over 2,000,000 in a Google query for “hilarious names.” Seventy-five percent of Hilarious Names’ traffic comes from search engines and 19% is from the Digg post. He concedes that 40-50 visitors a day isn’t that big of a deal, but it is kind of impressive considering that this traffic comes six months after his post on Digg and the only effort he put into the blog was posting two articles.

As an avid Digg user (a “Digg addict,” if you will) I’m intrigued. It makes sense, but like the people before Ben Cook, I never really thought about how much traffic a blog could be left with once the Digg effect had waned. Digg really holds a lot more potential than many people give it credit for.

Source: Blogging Experiment - The Lasting Digg Effect

CenterNetworks.com is a very informative blog that was relaunched in September 2006 to focus on the "new" Internet. As a daily reader of CenterNetworks I wanted to share with you a very interesting post they had today that talked about the potential of the Diggeffect being the demise of Digg.com. A snippet of their post is below...

From CenterNetworks: "At the time of this writing, three of the fifteen links to stories on digg.com's front page resulted in pages that would not load. In other words, the digg effect had sent it's tidal wave over 20% of the servers hosting these stories. This problem does vary from time to time as there are days in which most of the front page stories are from large sites with plenty of bandwidth and then days where there are numerous stories from small sites with inadequate servers. I think today's three of fifteen is a pretty average occurrence."

Click here for the rest of the post. Keep up the great work CenterNetworks!