Why Reddit & StumbleUpon Are Better Than Digg

by Patrick Altoft on July 8, 2008

Most people spend way too much time trying to use Digg to send traffic to their websites. The time and effort it takes to understand and befriend the Digg community and get your content onto the front page is disproportional to the benefits.

Hitting the front page of Reddit sends a much higher quality of traffic than Digg and can, in some cases, send more visitors. Digg is quite crowded and a story that takes 24 hours to reach the front page can be gone in a couple of hours as new stories replace it.

Reddit has a slightly different algorithm that allows super popular stories to stay at the top of the front page for longer.

A good front page story on Reddit can easily expect to receive 25,000 unique visitors.

Traffic Stats

Which visitors are better

One average Diggers stay on Blogstorm for just 19 seconds, Reddit users stay for 25. The bounce rate for Reddit is 7% lower, users visit more pages (1.21 compared to 1.14) and the percentage of new users is higher on a Reddit story than a Digg story.

However if you take a look at the chart below you can see that one traffic source completely blows the rest away – StumbleUpon.

Of the 165,000 StumbleUpon visitors we’ve had the bounce rate has been 37%, that’s a staggering 35% less than the site average. StumbleUpon also has the highest percentage of new visitors at 93.3%.

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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }

Rob Lewis 08 Jul 2008 at 11:43 am: Patrick – are you going to Digg this post and see how the Digg audience takes it??!
Rich 08 Jul 2008 at 11:51 am: Interesting results, looking at that data I would say digg is still better than reddit (if you can hit the front page) just on the sheer amount of traffic, you’re still getting approx 3 times the amount of non-bouncing visitors.

I also find when googleing for something that a digg link sometimes pops up, I’ve yet to see many reddit pages.
Patrick Altoft 08 Jul 2008 at 1:03 pm
Find me on Twitter: I would do but this blog is on the auto bury list at Digg.
More comments from Patrick Altoft
Adam Pieniazek 09 Jul 2008 at 7:36 am: 100% in agreement with you Patrick. I think the vastly superior comment system and community at reddit is a big reason for the “better” visitors. Stumbleupon is the internet’s version of a billboard.
Nathan 09 Jul 2008 at 2:44 pm: IMO your logic is completely backwards. A 91% bounce rate means that 91% of the people who visit Digg are clicking a link. Which means a 91% __SUCCESS__ rate. It means 91% of viewers found what they were looking for on the first try.
Patrick Altoft 09 Jul 2008 at 3:57 pm
Find me on Twitter: A 91% bounce rate means 91% of people left the site without visiting any other page. IMO that’s pretty poor.
More comments from Patrick Altoft
devjargon 09 Jul 2008 at 4:15 pm: Baha, Nathan you’re totally wrong.

That being said. 91% of 233,594 is 210,234 meaning that approximately 21,000 people stay on your site for longer.

For reddit, 83% of 45,715 is 37,943 meaning that approximately 7770 people stay on your site.

Digg traffic is vastly superior to reddit traffic but still doesn’t compare to the great traffic from stumbleupon.
Mr. Gunn 14 Jul 2008 at 4:35 am: You’re exactly right that spending your time trying to manipulate Digg is wasted effort, but if you’re also correct that the problem is because too many people are trying to get onto the front page, what makes you think that this wouldn’t hold true for Reddit and StumbleUpon as well? If everyone starts submitting to Reddit, it’ll start to suck just as hard.

The best way to generate quality traffic is still to put your effort into creating content that adds something to the visitor’s understanding. Spending too much time on SEO and marketing takes away from doing this, and it’s just not needed. If your content is useful and novel, it will be picked up and spread by your readers more effectively than you can achieve by any amount of self-promotion.
Brad Spencer 30 Jul 2008 at 1:45 pm: Thanks for this excellent post. I’ve heard a lot recently about Reddit and I wanted to do some investigating. I’m an avid stumbler and can’t wait to add Reddit to my arsenal of Web 2.0 sites I use (Twitter is my recent addiction .

If Reddit is so much better than Digg, why doesn’t Reddit have a bigger base of users?

Thanks again and I’m subscribing to your RSS feed!
Shishir 27 Mar 2009 at 10:13 am: This post is a good indicator of something better than digg. However, stumbleupon does not accept my pages, I don’t know why?