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Digg's Aggressive Tactics Are Paying Off, with Traffic Numbers Soaring

While it counters the increasing threat posed by Twitter

Aug 10, 2009 08:20 GMT  ·  By
Digg traffic has seen strong growth in the past months
   Digg traffic has seen strong growth in the past months

It looks like Digg may be getting what it seems to want the most as the site has seen a strong growth in audience in the past several months, adding 5 million unique visitors in just four months. Spurred by some of the sometimes not so popular changes, the numbers keep on rising, which can only be a good thing for a site that is seeing its core business threatened by more agile players like Twitter.

Digg's audience grew from 33.5 million unique visitors in February to almost 39 million in June according to Compete numbers, and comScore data shows a similar trend, with the site bringing in 8.8 million unique visitors in the US alone, a 31 percent rise over the previous three months. While these numbers may vary and they're far from exact, they do show a growing trend.

The site has been aggressively pursuing traffic for the last months, sometimes through more “unorthodox” means like the infamous DiggBar. Launched in April as a URL shortener, it immediately got people roused up as it added a toolbar on top of the sites pointed at in the links. Digg eventually relented and changed the behavior so that the bar would only show up for logged-in users.

It didn't take long for the feature to be the center of unwelcomed attention again after all of the links shortened with the service got redirected to a Digg landing page instead of the story initially linked. This too caused a lot of criticism and made the site back off once more, with the new “functionality” only enabled for new links added to the service. Still, Digg argued that the DiggBar wasn't a URL shortener but rather a tool for users to share content on the site, which may actually be a smart move considering the fate of other ULR shorteners.

Still, not all of the moves have been shady, with the new search launched in April providing a much better experience and the recently introduced Digg Dialoggs possibly bringing in more visitors. The company isn't stopping here though, with a very powerful new API coming, allowing third-party developers to build greatly enhanced tools using the service and the innovative Digg Ads, which have been recently released in public beta.