Over lunch with a local start up, the conversation moved towards Digg, encouraging ‘Digg’ing, and generally putting more guarantees around getting ‘Dugg’. While it’s great for exposure, it akin to unloading a bus fleet of tourists into your house. Sure, some of them may stick around and have a beer but, is the line to the bathroom worth it?

I’m not confident traffic and page views are actually the metrics worth tracking. Digg or otherwise. MySpace has lots of page views – because it’s such a poorly designed site. Conversely, Digg, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube all have a strong level of engagement.

Engagement. How do we measure engagement?
Number of posts, comments, “friendships”, a given member contributes? Maybe. Feels closer.

Experience has shown me it’s easier to sell to the same customer with each consecutive sale. With that in mind, the idea is to create a structure that supports multiple sales/transactions (subscriptions are the easy answer). If overhead is low enough, it’s conceivable that sustainable success could be attained with a fairly small number of paying customers.

Oh, on a related note – I predict 6 months before Digg is replaced by something else, if only because it will be over run by spammers.

Related Elsewhere:
Deep Jive Interests: Digg’s Failure: When “No Moderation” Doesn’t Work
Deep Jive Interests: Digg’s Editors Show Their Invisible Hand (Again)

Micro Persuasion: Fake News Story Games Thousands of Digg Users

UPDATE 11 Dec 2006

“…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.” – Jason Clarke

Jason continues:

“But digg users tend to be those that will sign up for almost any beta product or service, then bore of it quickly and abandon it for the next big thing.”