How much money is a Digg worth? More than $2!

Since the front page is what drives Digg I wanted to find out just how much money we are generating for the sites we Digg. So I tried a (non-scientific) experiment to see just how much money we are generating for the sites that get Dugg.

I created a website and put some Google ads on it. I then submitted a few of my pages to Digg and waited for them to make it to the front page. Two of them made it. In the 24 hours after the articles made the front page of the Videos section I have received around 38,000 Ad Impressions and almost 250 actual clicks. This comes out to around $53!

Now I know you're saying "but only registered Digg users can browse the Video pages!" Well if we assume that only 5% of the traffic to an article are registered users that Digg the same article and assume a similar impressions-to-Diggs ratio as I experienced then I come up with the following numbers:

Ad impressions to Diggs: 17.5
Diggs to ad clicks: 8.8
$ to Diggs : $0.024 per Digg


However the skeptical observer would say "You don't need 2000 Diggs to get to the front page, you only need 25-30, so those are really the only valuable Diggs".
And he would be exactly right. When compensating for this the dollar amount comes out to.... $2.12!

But that is assuming the traffic on the video page is the same as the front page. Currently only logged in members have access to the video page and other pages, so this greatly reduces the traffic to the video page. If you assume that only 20% of the people who visit the front page also visit the video page then you have to multiply that number by 10! That's right, one single Digg is potentially worth over 10 to a site. And that is only for one day of traffic! So it actually much much higher. That's a couple hundred for one day for one article on one site!