The entry I linked to with both news aggregators was The Three Letters. I did not know what sort of result to expect but I was overwhelmed by the response of the Diggers and underwhelmed by the response of the 'Scapers.
Once the story hit the front page on Digg I was seeing over a thousand hits per hour. The story has gotten well over 1,000 Diggs since then yet, on Netscape, the same story has only ever received 1 vote, mine!
I wasn't exactly surprised by this turn of events. Everyone knows that Digg is the big dog in terms of social book marking sites and that Netscape is nothing more than a cheap attempt at riding on Digg's coattails but... not a single vote on Netscape?
At then end of the week I checked my web server statistics to see where my traffic came from in regards to this and I saw something very interesting:
Day One: Digg 15K hits, Netscape 3 hits, StumbleUpon 898 hits.
Day Two: Digg 8K hits, Netscape 1 hit, StumbleUpon 1,205 hits.
Day Three Digg: 1K hits, Netscape 0 hits, StumbleUpon 1,423 hits.
This trend continued until after a week's time I was averaging below 100 hits from Digg and 1K hits from Stumbleupon. This led me to a very interesting conclusion:
Digg brings in the hits, but StumbleUpon has the legs.
In the end, Digg had brought in the highest number of hits, but they were fleeting. A massive wave of people will go from Digg, to your blog and then never return. Netscape? Do I even need to linger on that one? StumbleUpon... there be the long tail for a blogger!
I'm not going to go into anything to do with advertising revenue in this article so don't expect a treatise on how StumbleUpon effects your advertising revenue!
I do not know if this story would have gotten the legs it acquired if it had not appeared on Digg. I do not know who first gave the link a thumbs up and thereby caused the Stumble stampede. The only thing I do know is that Digg and StumbleUpon are a great team!
Just as MS has been recently known to say that you should ignore the PS3 and buy an X-Box 360 and a Wii I must say to ignore Netscape and go with the powerhouse of Digg and StumbleUpon!
