Digg User Statistics and the Digg Effect

This is the follow-up report from Sunday's digg statistics experiment.
You can see the original page here: fvvw.com/digg.

Experiment Introduction

If you're a frequent digger, you'll know that getting on the digg homepage generates a lot of traffic.

So just how much traffic is generated to a homepage story? Where does the traffic come from? What do diggers use to access stories?

To find answers to these questions, I set up a simple page with a few types of traffic counters. I submitted this page to digg.

As you may have noticed, the visible hit counters kept resetting and weren't very accurate. They were just to give people something to look at.
The real statistics were being collected by apache (my server software), and are much more accurate. This report contains the apache stats.

The Results

Traffic

While on the digg homepage, the page received 13,283 unique visitors (One IP = One Unique) and 2,527,056 hits!
That's a lot of traffic in such a short time. Unsurprisingly, many users refreshed the page to get the stats up. To be accurate, I'm not showing refreshes in this report.

Here's all that traffic broken into sections for Browser/OS/Country:

Diggers' favorite browser is... Firefox!

No surprise here, the vast majority of diggers use Firefox. This is followed in second by Safari. Here's the breakdown:

Diggers' favorite OS is... Windows! (but not by much)*

With just a slim majority of 52.6%, Windows is closely followed by Mac and Linux

*I've had a number of people comment that it is by much, and they'd be right.
What I meant was, compared to other site's stats, windows at 52% isn't much at all.

Diggers' Main Country is... USA

Not surprisingly the US is digg traffic's main originating country, followed by other mainly english countries.

I can't be sure how accurate this section is. I got these figures from a Geo IP database.
It seems fairly accurate +/- 5% per country. IPs I couldn't trace account for 1.7% of the traffic.

Conclusion

This confirms why getting on digg crashes many servers, with over 13000 uniques in under a day.
This also shows that Firefox is the dominant browser among mostly tech-savvy diggers. Mac and Linux also show a very strong following.

Keep in mind this report won't be completely accurate, as it's just a small sample of diggers from one day of stats.

Thank for reading!

Copyright © 2007 Nathan LaPierre