The Next Web

Web publishers, forget about Digg. Use StumbleUpon!

Written on July 2, 2008 – 12:22 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

As every ambitious web publisher does, I’m trying out some alternative ways to attract more visitors. The most important ways are still to offer great content and strive to address the information needs of readers as much as possible - yet it doesn’t hurt anyone to experiment with the possibilities digital media offers us. Of course there’s the SEO card, for which I gladly refer to Yoast, and then there’s that other popular option, social media.

The long term benefit of Digg

In the early days of this blog, Boris wrote a post about the long term benefits of Digg. Back then, we got a fair share of our visitors found us through Digg. According to Boris, this was caused by two trends:

• People use alternative ways of searching, like social media.
• Deborah Schultz reported that 61% of your visits go to posts older than a month, presumably through Google and.., social media.

We still welcome around the same amount of visitors via Digg, only the percentage is much lower now (around 1 percent of all referring links from the last thirty days). As you can tell by the screen shot below, this isn’t really impressive. Although there’s a long tail of two pages, these top 5 results give an idea of the number of referrers.

Top 5 Digg articles of the last thirty days

So apart from the frontpage mentions, Digg hasn’t be really useful. The long term benefit is quite marginal.

Well, here’s an alternative

Another service did prove to be very useful when it comes to finding new readers: StumbleUpon. Clicks from this service account for 3,2 percent of all our referring links the last thirty days (by the way, most referrers are other bloggers and Google). In a way, this makes sense, as StumbleUpon is all about discovery. When people want to search, they go to Google, when they want to find popular articles, they go to Digg, yet when people want to discover interesting content, StumbleUpon is the place to go to. Partly because of that, it has been the second most popular social media site the last thirty days (Reddit was no. 1 because we hit the frontpage). Here are the top five results:

Top 5 StumbleUpon articles of the last thirty days

Some more fun facts

• For this blog, an article on Digg brings in roughly three times more traffic than on Reddit (10000 compared to 300)
• Hacker News is the no. 3 social medium for us, these guys from Ycombinator bring in 3 percent of all visitors who came here via a referrer.
• Delicious only accounts for 0.6 percent, even though we got featured in the popular section. It seems like this service is really all about self-reference.

I hope you like that post!

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delicious, digg, hacker news, reddit, social media, stumbleupon

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Once You’re Lucky, Twice Your Bloody Lucky!

Written on May 14, 2008 – 11:07 am
Steven Carrol, Next Web WebTipr France

I have thought long and hard about luck and following all this hype around the concept Sarah Lacy is promoting ‘Once Your Lucky, Twice You’re Good’. Well, I disagree with her assertion!

Back in my ‘naive days’ I would have argued vigorously that one doesn’t need luck at all, instead innovation, logic, elegance, brutal hard work and a twist of magic were the ingredients essential for success. This would have been while I was building my first empire. During that experience I didn’t get very rich (financially) but I did learn more about life / business / creation / ideas / people / magic and luck than I could have ever imagined. My little baby organically grew from a 20K overdraft to a turnover of 2 million GBP annually (6 years after launch) and garnered a cult following.

Its been a long time now since riding those early waves and I have had long enough to analyze the experience and realize the arrogance of belittling lady luck. She sure as hell taught me a few hard lessons as a result. Needless to say I have rather more respect for her charm now and in an effort to make peace I am dedicating this article to her.

One of my favorite online destinations is Hacker News, a forum where hackers / startups discuss the issues of the day. A theme that has been popping up there recently is controversy over the value of ideas, with many arguing that ideas are worthless and execution is everything. Again I totally disagree. Ideas and luck are two of the most rare but essential and non quantitative elements necessary for success, followed sometime later by the usual host of other elements that ultimately determine the fate of such a journey.

To illustrate my points, first I need narrow down the criteria of what is considered to be ‘a win’. With Internet startups I’m going to classify ‘a win’ as ultimately financial success, followed secondly by user participation and adoption. Yet I want to strongly stress these are not my personal criteria as to what constitutes as ‘a win’, but only what appears to be the de-facto standard by which many are currently judging.

Given that financial success is the ultimate milestone I will use the Google as the standard by which I make my case. Google is without doubt the current online financial super star, they are making more money than anyone else and they have available to them every single advantage that money can buy. And while they have leveraged their resources in every way imaginable, they essentially still only have Adwords / Adsense as their core cash cow, while every other arm is either loosing money or financially insignificant. Why is this? Luck!

You cannot make a compelling argument that they are not good, why that is their company manifestation after all. No it is not because Google are bad, but good luck is like lightening, it rarely strikes in the same place twice and if it does you will be bloody lucky, evidently so.

Coupled with the power of ideas, really good ideas share the same traits as luck, in as much as they are just as rare but ultimately make all the difference in the direction you choose, where you will then need lady luck to give you the kiss of life in order to achieve ’success’.

adwords, google, hacker news, Inspiration, luck, sarah lacy

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