How and why block Digg / Digg Sucks / Digg traffic worthless

How and why block Digg / Digg Sucks / Digg traffic worthless
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Do you think Digg sucks from site owner POV?

Yes!

Partly... specify below!

100%

I dont care

Voted : 1

Total Votes : 1

This poll does not expire

Sun Nov 25, 2007 10:52 am	Reply and quote this post

You've reached this page because the site you were trying to visit now blocks visitors from Digg and other social media sites.

http://whydiggisblocked.com/

Quote:

The users of sites such as Digg, Netscape, Reddit and StumbleUpon openly endorse Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites, and are well known for providing no value to the sites they visit. Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads, Digg users who don't click on these ads are stealing bandwidth without paying for it and website owners deserve a method to block this unauthorized bandwith theft.

Since social media sites do not allow website owners a method for excluding content and do not obey robots.txt law, abiding webmasters are forced to block all users from social media sites. Demographics have shown that not only are Digg and other social media users a somewhat small and insignificant percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking these users seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers..

If you wish to view the site you came from we suggest stopping using social media sites and finding the resources through Google instead.

Why digg is destined for failure
by Jason Clarke
If you've ever had the good fortune of having one of your websites or blog posts dugg to the point of showing up on digg's homepage, you've enjoyed a huge traffic boost to your site. This is wonderful for web publishers, and I'm not going to lie and say that we don't care about it here at Download Squad; in fact, since the success of a given post is measured in large part by the traffic it drives to our site, it's certainly a goal of ours to have our posts make the homepage on digg.

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2006/12/11/why-digg-is-destined-for-failure/

Digg traffic - more trouble than it's worth

Quote:

Finally, what is the value of having your content linked to by digg? Right now it can be financially lucrative if you are able to convert unqualified page views into dollars reliably. Advertisers that pay per page view do so based on sheer traffic numbers because there is no easy way to measure the quality of that traffic. Of course, if your advertising requires users to click before you make any money, you're more likely to induce a net cost on your site by being dugg than you are to earn anything. Consider this post from tech-recipes from over a year ago; this was back when digg was less than a year old, and had not yet overtaken slashdot. Even then it was clear that digg users are not valuable for a site that relies on advertising clicks to generate revenue, since they drop by for a cursory look, then head off looking for another distraction. The problem has compounded considering digg has grown in leaps and bounds since that article was written.

Five Reasons Why Digg Sucks

Donâ€™t get me wrong, Iâ€™m a digg user and will continue to use digg (Iâ€™m not very active though, I guess Iâ€™m more of a lurkerâ€¦) and there are stories on the site that I would not have heard about otherwise. Still, I think thereâ€™s a lot to be desired and since I donâ€™t know how to fix things I guess Iâ€™ll just bitch about them. So, my five reasons why I think digg sucks:

1. Despite being a â€œtechnology news websiteâ€ it consistently features stories that are not technology-related in the least. Stories like, â€œOMG! Clay Aiken is GAY!!â€ or â€œBritney Spears to appear on Simpsons!!â€ are very common on the site.* GMAFB, what does any of that have to do with technology? Itâ€™s a little thing to bitch about but still, if I wanted that kind of crap Iâ€™d look up different sites that specialize in it. Just keep things to technology, thatâ€™s all I ask.
2. Members can be elitist assholes. I rarely see anything that approaches a rational discussion in the comments, instead, you are treated to off-topic flame wars and personal attacks, most of which involve some sort of â€œIâ€™m OLD SKOOL and Iâ€™m greatâ€ type of talk. Iâ€™ve seen new members of the community ask a reasonable question only to be told to â€œGo back to engadget where you belong because this is Digg where our mouths are even bigger than our dicks.â€**
3. Webmasters are given no warning when their site is going to be â€œdugg.â€ I think itâ€™s irresponsible of a so-called technology community to overwhelm a web server without having a system in place that would allow the webmaster to set up some mirrors or somehow prepare his site for when the traffic comes. The, for lack of a better term, digg-effect can be devastating to a site and the bandwidth bill can get into the thousands before the webmaster knows whatâ€™s going on. These â€œdiggersâ€ know exactly what they are doing yet they completely disregard their responsibility for bringing a site down.
4. Digg traffic does not equal advertising dollars. Many webmasters have advertising on their sites, like Googleâ€™s Adsense or Yahoo!â€™s YPN and mistakenly thing that getting dugg will equal money in their pockets. This is dead wrong. The people that use digg donâ€™t click on ads, theyâ€™re the wrong crowd for contextual advertising, and the webmaster usually ends up paying for a ton of bandwidth and lowers his click-through rate, thereby causing himself to be smart-priced out of the higher-paying ads that might have been shown on his site.***
5. Apple is God and Microsoft is the Devil. I just donâ€™t understand why everyone has to jump all over a guy just because he has Windows installed on his laptop. You want to know something jerks? Sometimes people in the world canâ€™t afford the Apple-tax and they have to get something thatâ€™s in their price range. Yeah, everyone knows that Windows sucks, we donâ€™t need to hear it every second.

Well, thatâ€™s my five so I guess I should stop. Iâ€™m sure there are other people out there with different reasons of why digg sucks, care to share yours?

* No, these arenâ€™t real headlines (that Iâ€™m aware of.) I was exaggerating for effect.

** Not all members are elitist assholes. Iâ€™ve seen some very helpful comments and it would be unfair to the nice people to call them names. Also, I donâ€™t think anyone actually made the remark that I did, once again I was exaggerating for effect. I canâ€™t help it, Iâ€™m a writer.

*** There are probably exceptions to this, in fact, it was a guess on my part when I mentioned smart-pricing. Who knows, Iâ€™m sure there are some happy webmasters that have gotten dugg but Iâ€™ve read a lot of horror stories.

http://drewmckinney.net/2006/03/22/five-reasons-why-digg-sucks/

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/04/10/digg-users-3-times-less-likely-to-click-ads-than-google-users/

Digg Users 3 Times Less Likely to Click Ads Than Google Users
by Chrispian Burks

Anyone whoâ€™s been on Digg can tell you that while the traffic can be amazing there isnâ€™t a correlating increase in ad revenue, the bottom line being Digg users donâ€™t click on ads like traditional visitors do and especially not as much as traffic from search engines. Chitika has stepped up and provided some facts to backup this claim.

Quote:

Chitika grabbed 31 days of logs and compared traffic from Digg and Google and came to the obvious conclusion that Digg users are less likely to click on ads. The actual ratio is a little closer than I thought it would be. I suspected something like 5 to 1 or 10 to 1, but Chitikaâ€™s results put Digg users at 3 times less likely to click on ads. As we all know users are becoming more and more banner/ad blind and no one more so than the tech/geek crowd which is the primary audience of Digg.

What does this mean in terms of making money? Donâ€™t rely on the Digg traffic as a direct method for making money. Itâ€™s a means to get exposure. If you do get on Digg try to capture the audience as much as possible. Direct them to other content on your site and try to get them to become repeat visitors. Youâ€™ll also get some trackbacks and links from being on Digg and we all know how important links are.

Read Digg Traffic v/s Google Traffic - A Chitika Analysis Report for the full details on Chitikaâ€™s report.

http://www.eliteretreat.info/
One of the observations raised at Elite Retreat San Francisco was: Digg Users are lousy ad clickers. So I decided to put this theory to the test using data from the billion+ ads served by Chitika over a 31 day period.
http://chitika.com/blog/?p=162

How to block Digg & other social sites.

Digg Block (PHP)
Place this at the very beginning of any page you want blocked.

Code:

<?

$userAgent=strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);

if((strstr($userAgent, 'digg'))||(strstr($userAgent, 'reddit'))||(strstr($userAgent, 'stumbleupon'))||(strstr($userAgent, 'netscape')))

{

 header("Location: http://whydiggisblocked.com");

 exit();

}

?&gt;

Digg Block (JavaScript)
The first code will need to be saved as a PHP file to be referenced by the second code.
Save as fftest.php

Code:

<?

$userAgent=strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);

if((strstr($userAgent, 'digg'))||(strstr($userAgent, 'reddit'))||(strstr($userAgent, 'stumbleupon'))||(strstr($userAgent, 'netscape')))

{

echo "window.location='http://whydiggisblocked.com/';";

}

?&gt;

JavaScript
insert in the HEAD section of any page your want blocked.

Code:

<script src="fftest.php"&gt;</script&gt;

Your thoughts?

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