Digg Down - OverDugg, Redesign or Conspiracy?

March 2, 2007

From about 12 noon on March 2nd through 5pm, the popular social bookmarking site Digg.com was “out of service”.  The following page appeared in it’s place (hyperlinks at bottom of page):

 

digg down screen capture

 

Digg recieves an inexorbitant amount of traffic each day and sites making it Digg’s front page can experience hundreds of hits each second!  While they claim to be making some “changes”, could there be alterior motives?

Whether or not there are alterior motives or even a conspiracy is subjective, but one thing is for sure: the 19 blogs listed during this significant amount of Digg Downtime are sure to experience an immense amount of traffic! The way these blogs are listed would make one believe that each Digg Staff Member was able to recommend one website which recieves a link.

A conspiracy theorist would look for a pattern in the blogs linked to:

  • Official site for the band Oasis
  • Official site for the band They Might Be Giants
  • Suicide Girls (a risque site of model photos)
  • Ask A Ninja (Ridiculous Humor)
  • BBC News

Alright, so there doesn’t seem to be a pattern.  How then, were every single one of these sites able to handle the huge influx of traffic that would send the normal medium sized business down?  Did they have advanced notice? Perhaps just got lucky? Or maybe Digg sold this opportunity to them for monetary gain.

Alright, so there probably isn’t any conspiracy… but it wouldn’t have been a bad idea. Digg probably could have capitalized on this opportunity by generating thousands of dollars of revenue.  If this down time had been “planned” and each of these text links were sold to clients, how much do you think people would pay?  Does your site have a large and steady flow of traffic?  Maybe every once in awhile you want to schedule 6 hours of “down time” to place a line of text saying, “We’re performing maintenence and the site will be back shortly”.  Throw down some adsense, affiliate links or sell private text links.  Or take the “recommended sites” approach, as Digg did, and link to some of your lesser known sites to filter traffic and attention their way (subtly).

I can’t speculate on the actual reasons why Digg was down.  It was likely, as they mentioned, simple maintenence, updating and security issues.  Still, it’s interesting to think of the possibilities and how Digg could have turned this small negative into a really big positive (monetarily speaking).  Challenges are opportunities in disguise.

What do YOU think?

This is the list of hyperlinks from the Digg Screen Capture above:

(Like they need any more traffic!)

NOTE: After reviewing and refreshing the page, it appears that the page was accessible via http://www.digg.com while http://digg.com yielded the “out of service” error.  Still interesting to think about.

Comments

One Response to “Digg Down - OverDugg, Redesign or Conspiracy?”

  1. HL on March 6th, 2007 5:03 am

    It’s a nice theory, but purely speculative. Every time Digg goes down I get 10-15,000 extra hits - (See http://growabrain.typepad.com/growabrain/people_are_talking_about_growabrain/index.html) - I have nothing to do with it

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