Neomeme

An intrepid user of social news networks Digg and reddit decided to try a little experiment: He posted a story to both sites and counted referrers to see how many people came from each site, thus deciding once and for all which site drives more traffic. The results are unsurprising- reddit leads Digg by an order of magnitude. I see the same thing in referrers for my blog, and I’m sure other bloggers see similar results. Time and time again, with a post submitted to Digg and reddit simultaneously, especially one that does not make the front page of either site, reddit results in two to three times more clicks.

It would appear at first look that submission to reddit is more beneficial, and that advertisers should seriously look at reddit as opposed to Digg. But that’s not the whole picture. This experiment is flawed in numerous ways, but there is one glaring difference the author fails to take into account. Digg provides an area for a description, whereas reddit has only a title. Because they do not have the luxury of a description, and titles are often ambiguous or unclear, reddit users are used to clicking on the story in order to get more information. Digg users, on the other hand, will often pass on a story based on the description. But there was a more powerful force at work there as well: The reviled Digg “bury” button. Within seconds of making the front page, the story on Digg was buried and dissapeared from the front page, effectively cutting off the sure flood of clicks that could have followed. The story on reddit, however, continued to flourish and grow, securing a place at the very top of the page.

This simple measurement is a perfect example of how quantitative metrics cannot be relied on exclusively, particularly in web advertising. Quantitatively, reddit emerged the clear winner. The quality of the clicks however, is up for grabs. The experiment would have been much more interesting(and potentially profitable) if the submitter put in a few AdSense links around the page, and counted how many Adsense clicks came from each site. This would have given a clearer picture of which site, numbers aside, is more valuable. Of course then the story would have probably been voted down as amoral profiteering, and would have never made the front page on any site. Ultimately, the experiment failed miserably, as the reddit story got far more front-page exposure than the Digg one. All the same, the experiment raises many interesting questions that could be applied more thoroughly to the visitor statistics of a legitimate article that got front-paged at both sites.

This is a perfect example of how a simple design choice(description vs. no description) can have profound ramifications. A reddit submission may be great for ad impressions(CPM, not PPC), but not all that great for conversions and actual leads or sales.