A lot of people wonder just how much money a front paged story on Digg is worth. My blog has made it there at least once and I'm going tell you what I made off of it. This may vary for others.
This is a screen cap of my AdSense earnings from a few days prior and a few days after my blog article hit Digg's Home Page.
Here is a link to the story and here is the Digg link.
The story was submitted to Digg on Wednesday September 13, 2006. It garnered a few comments but no real income burst. Later that evening my hosting provider locked out my blog directory on the server (everything else worked fine) so a large amount of my traffic went to duggmirror. As far as I know duggmirror mirrors everything, including your AdSense code.
The story was on the Home Page for Thursday September 14, 2006 and the web blog was back up and taking hits. Yet, still no real jump in income.
When Friday September 15, 2006 rolled in well... This is the day I made $150+ in AdSense earnings!
My blog only registered about 15K hits for the story on Saturday morning. I'm going to assume that the majority of the readers from Digg saw the story via duggmirror. I know that duggmirror mirrored my AdSense code as I received 30K AdSense impressions over the week yet only half that number in hits on my blog. This baffled me somewhat as more than 50% of Digg users are known to use AdBlock services.
This may not be the best test of the "Home Page Effect" of Digg as this story also ended up being submitted to StumbleUpon and I received the majority of hits from that rather than Digg. Though those hits were spread out over a longer period of time.
So, there you have it. You now know what I made off of a blog article hitting the Home Page on Digg. Oh yes, that one article also moved me from being site number 10 million or so on Alexa to site number 180K!
Speaking of duggmirror, my fellow blogger Muhammad Saleem who writes the mulife blog has written a short piece on the legality of duggmirror. Why not give it a read?
