For many, getting a link to their site on the Digg homepage is a dream that they constantly work toward. If they do so, massive amounts of traffic will come their way. From this, the theory goes, readership, brand awareness, ad revenue, etc., should all shoot through the roof. But will it really?
Scott Karp states: Not All Traffic Is Created Equal. He looks at metrics from around the web, with some interesting tid-bits of information:
“Digg referrals spent an average of 3.6 seconds on the site, compared to link referrals that spend an average of one minute or more. Search and Del.icio.us traffic don’t spend much time, but Digg’s average is only 25-50% of the other averages.”
His conclusion shakes up our notion of how the web will be monetized in the future:
“At some point sites are going to start to discriminate among traffic sources in terms of quality rather than quantity. Sure, if you have advertisers who are willing to blindly monetize any page view, it might not seem to matter on the surface. But I wouldn’t count on that lack of discrimination to last.”