How Much is Your Digg Worth?

Ever wondered how much your Digg is worth? Maximum PC wondered, too. In their article, Secrets of the Digg Economy Unveiled, they list out details of experiments they performed to understand how much value a click can bring to a site. According to the formula (see below), a Digg is worth about $15 if you Digg an upcoming story that hits the front page. Once a story is on the front page of Digg, further Diggs are worth about $2. Why? When most stories hit the front page, the result is a kind of pile-on effect, where thousands of people read the story and agree that it deserves recognition, which they affirm by Digging the story themselves. Because of this dynamic, the very first 100 to 200 Diggs that it takes to reach the front page are infinitely more valuable than the 1200 or 1800 that follow. Without the first 100 to 200 Diggs, the article would not have the additional 1000+ followup Diggs. The formula Maximum PC used for calculating the value of a Digg: D^y is the value of a single Digg. V^d is the page views referred by (that is, generated by ) Digg. R^v is the revenue generated per page view. And D is the total number of Diggs a story has received. Du is the value of every Digg that is applied before a story hits the front page, and is found by replacing D with 150, which seems to be the average number of Diggs necessary for a story to hit the front page these days.