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Today marks seven days since my post of a burning lightbulb made #1 on the news aggregate website digg.com. I have always heard about “The Digg Effect” (a term to refer to the huge influx of traffic generated by a story on digg) and wondered how much traffic is generated. Now I know.

Prior to February 5th, this website averaged around 300 – 400 visitors a day. While this is not a huge number, it had been gradually growing over the 14 month period of the site’s existence. Then the story hit on digg and here is what happened:

Monday February 5 – 126,742
Tuesday February 6 – 25,258
Wednesday February 7 – 12,199
Thursday February 8 – 6,211
Friday February 9 – 4,310
Saturday February 10 – 4,216
Sunday February 11 – 3,776

That’s 183,716 page loads from 158,312 unique visitors in the past week. If I remove my previous average of 300-400 per day, that is over 180,000 hits generated as a result of the digg story. Wow!

One thing I didn’t expect with the notoriety on digg was the amount of traffic from other websites that this would create. While digg generated most of the hits the first day or two, other sites began referring hits to me. Here is a breakdown of where the most of the traffic came from over the past seven days:

digg.com – 63.86%
reddit.com – 10.06%
direct – 5.40%
stumbleupon.com – 4.30%
monitor.hr – 2.25%
bluesnews.com – 1.38%
clicked.msnbc.msn.com – 1.35%

A frequent outcome of websites being dugg is that the server is unable to handle the huge increase in traffic. In my case, this traffic was approximately 10,000 hits per hour in the first 12 hours of being on the front page of digg. LeggNet.com handled the traffic extremely well with the only hiccup being a slight slowdown on Monday afternoon that required a reboot. Thankfully, I have unlimited bandwidth on my hosting account.

My hope from this experience is that some of the visitors that have found my site in the past week will continue visiting. The increase in comments and email has been great. Thank you.

-Rich

p.s. If you’d like to monitor LeggNet.com via RSS, please add /rss/leggnet.xml to your reader.