Social networking link analysis
Posted by Colin | Filed under Nonsense, Uncategorized
I have always wondered what kind of traffic a digg, reddit, slashdot etc.. ‘web2.0′ link would generate. If you don’t know what digg is then read on. Digg is, I believe, the most popular ‘Web 2.0′ site on the net. Basically people submit links to stories and the populace votes on them. The idea is that the cream will rise to the top, although this is not always true.
I prefer a similar site - reddit - and posted a link to my own shot that I though others might get the same LOL out of it as I got: my flickr pic
I submitted it (lets call it “the LOL pic”) and, sure enough, the traffic started coming. And coming. Pretty soon I was at more views in one day then I had ever been. Ok sure it was only 1,100 - but that’s a lot in my world. 
Not bad for a pic that has pretty poor reddit results:
You can see it has a mere 3 up votes (3 people said they liked the link) and 2 down votes (2 didn’t like it). Taking a quick look at the highest ranked shot on reddit that uses a flickr account I can see that it has 277 up votes, 167 down votes and a whopping 27,425 views on flickr. Wow… that is some serious traffic driving capabilities.
Back to my 1,100 views… great publicity, eh?
Well, maybe not. Out of the 1,100 visitors lets see how many other shots got some lovin’:
Meh.
The second place ‘frankencamper’ shot got 24 views - only 6 of which came after the original ‘LOL’ shot was viewed. This leads me to believe that a maximum of 6 redditors went on to explore shots a mere ‘1 degree of separation’ from the original shot. That certainly doesn’t help spread the iHartPhotos brand!
After the first 300 or so hits I remembered to put a link to my web site on the LOL pic description (D’OH!). Surely the remaining 800 hits generated some site traffic, no?
No.
Six views? SIX views all day? SIX? Sure - that’s about my average, but c’mon, Web 2.0… give me some hits! Show me some love!
My conclusion is that I got little traffic or corollary benefit from my Web 2.0 debut because my LOL pic has very little to do with my overall body of work. If I were to get a similar volume linked from reddit to a shot that is more representative of my style then I imagine I would get more useful ‘publicity’ out of it. Too bad my usual stuff would garner very little interest on these sites 