Digg Sends Reddit 250,000 Visits

Digg hasn't been having a great week and, despite changes, things don't seem to be settling down. Reddit on the other hand, and expectantly perhaps, couldn't be better.

The recent Digg revolt, which pushed Reddit stories to take over the Digg homepage, led to a surge in traffic for the smaller site, though not by as much as some might have expected.

"We had some interesting traffic yesterday. Usually that would mean it's time for a technobabbly post-mortem about which part of our infrastructure failed and caused the site to go down for three hours," a post on the Reddit blog read.

"However, something strange happened this time: the site didn't go down (knock on wood)," Reddit's lead developer Christopher Slowe wrote.

"[C]ompletely taking over Digg's front page for an entire day generates about 250,000 visits, or a little under one-seventh of our traffic yesterday. (Told ya we were a big deal.)," he added.

Reddit, which has been pretty open about its internal data before, has provided the exact numbers to show how being featured on Digg influenced traffic.

The site saw quite a surge yesterday, with page views peaking at 810,000 impressions per hour, up from the 570,000 the site sees on average.

Reddit says that about one in four visitors were newcomers, but the ones that came stuck around. On average, visitors spent 11 minutes, 42 seconds on the site.

What's more, some decided to make a more permanent stay at Reddit, as registrations almost doubled reaching over 9,000.

For the entire day, on August 31, Digg accounted for 14 percent of traffic sources for Reddit with 41 percent being direct traffic and Google search 26 percent.

Digg has already made changes to the new site and plans to do others to please its users, so it's unclear if there will be any long term benefits for Reddit, but all the attention can't hurt.