The digg effect

Back in October 2006, one of our employees posted a video to YouTube of a track he created for the beta version of the game line rider. The game was released the previous month, and people had just begun to record their tracks and post them to YouTube. Although the video was substantially better than the others that were posted, not many people viewed the video during the first few days.

When a watcher saw the video and posted it to digg, the video started attracting attention. In fact, the day that the video was submitted to digg, it received over 50,000 hits. Ultimately, the video garnered nearly 2.5 million views and an article in the Wall Street Journal. Digg and similar sites use intelligent algorithms and user input to determine an article's rank. If your article reaches the front page or close to it, it's almost guaranteed to be big. Sometimes to get your voice heard, a quick submission to a web page is all you need.