Two days ago my post was submitted to Digg and Reddit, and although didn’t get on the homepage of either one, it still garnered some traffic. Everyone always talks about the digg effect and what it does to their clicks and how their site can’t handle the additional traffic and even how to avoid it if were to ever happen to you. But not everyone can get on the home page of these sites, it becomes the carrot that every webmaster/blogger/techie wants to achieve. But just because you don’t get on the homepage doesn’t mean you still can’t experience some of the same joys. But nobody speaks about this phenomenon. Nobody speaks about the “non-effect.” What is the “non-effect?” Well basically it’s what I’ve experienced, I would describe it as the shrapnel from the actual effect..

After hitting Digg and Reddit my site experience a pretty major jump in traffic. Not major jump is all relative I suppose. The amount of traffic I was receiving previous was anywhere from 5 to 10 hits a day, once it hit this is the spike I saw.

Now all of this traffic wasn’t from just Digg and Reddit. As a consequence of the non-effect I also got picked up in a news.com blog article which generated some hits as well as being number 10 in the Hot Blogs of the Day. Here’s a break down of the amount of hits I got from each across the three days.

As you can see Digg took the crown here, but not by much. Now remember, this is the non-effect so that means I got links from people surfing around on the particular sites and then clicking over to me. Which brings me to my next point. Although I got the most hits from Digg, Reddit actually provided more referral paths than Digg.

Based solely off of these findings it seems that the reddit users do more browsing of the site and will likely find your link buried somewhere deep, as apposed to Digg users who will typically only go one or two pages in. Hopefully you find these stats interesting, it’s always fun to watch your content being linked to and discussed. I thought that these findings were interesting enough to share with the rest of the folks who will be stuck with the non-effect of these sites.