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As many of you know by now, my article yesterday The Evolution of Yahoo, was featured on the front page of Digg. It’s the very first time I’ve ever had an article make it to the front page. In the past, the most diggs I’ve ever has was probably around 20 or so. After 40-50 diggs, yesterday’s article made it to the front page…that’s when the fun began.

The traffic started flowing in by the hundreds and then by the thousands. I was watching my statcounter page and every 5 seconds I would hit refresh and there would be another 200 uniques added to the total. It was insane. The traffic was so high that it crashed my site. I figured it would happen because I don’t run my sites on a dedicated server. I have a VPS, which can’t handle the load. I was forced to call my host’s tech support line 3 times and have them reboot my server. After the first reboot, the site was up for a minute, then crashed again. A lot of people would be pissed, but I thought it was quite entertaining.

Had my site not crashed so many times, I think my traffic would have been a lot higher. Yesterday I ended the day with 10,391 uniques. Thats about 10,250 higher than normal. As of right now, I’m already at 850, so as you can see the digg traffic is overflowing into future days.

The digg page for my article can be seen here. It has currently been dugg 572 times with 60 comments. Reading all the comments was the best part of this whole experience. I’ve never read comments on digg before. Man those people are funny. Here are a few of the better ones:

  • Yahoo has blown it several times. First they tried to become a content company when the Internet was asking for a search company - that arrogance allowed google to drive in 20 freight trains right under their nose. Second, they tried to appease China while telling their base in the US ‘FU’ - well once people in China started getting put in jail for exercising free speech (yahoo id them for the govt), the US base said FU harder right back at them.
  • I also am confused over the ‘hot’ features… more like confusing, bloated, disconnected acquisitions– sucked of any remaining innovation, left to languish.”
  • “new site loaded with hot features” vs. “a couple of news headlines buried within a dizzying mess of ads, celebrity gossip, and useless web2.0 eyecandy”
  • Yawn. Old news is useless.
  • This is what passes for news these days? Someone discovers the Internet Archive and it’s worth commenting about? Good lord, what’s next? “Slashdot ID numbers have been steadily incrementing over the years! Film at 11:00.”

Funny huh?

Now for the juicy part: The daily revenue after a digg. In the week prior to the digg, my blog made $2.00 via adsense. That comes to around 30 cents a day average. Yesterday, my blog earned $4.68. Thats almost 16 times higher than the daily average. Sure $4.68 isn’t a lot, but its the 16x that is the important figure. If you have a site making $10 on a normal day, then you make a front page to digg, that 16x translates into $160. Not bad for doing no work.

The only disappointment I have is not seeing an increase in the number of RSS subscribers I have. You’d think after having 10k+ uniques that some of them would subscribe? Maybe feedburner just hasn’t updated?

I’m also noticing quite a few link backs to my blog post. That is very important. I haven’t sifted through them all yet, but there’s atleast 10 I can see right away.

So that’s the story. Let me know if you have any comments or questions.