I have no idea. But say they get 1,000,000 visitors from this stunt, none of whom had ever heard of CodeWeavers before and none of whom will ever pay for another CodeWeavers product again (the folks who read Digg/Reddit/blogs tend not to pay for software ;-)). Then say that each of them tells 5 other people - that seems reasonable based on who I've told, and amounts to 5M people who know about CodeWeavers and didn't before. Then assume a 1% conversion rate. That's 50,000 new customers, and at $40/copy, $2M in additional revenue. Not bad for a publicity stunt.
The problem with Digg traffic is it's garbage. The conversion rate is almost zero. It's not high-quality views. It's like showing ads to college students on Facebook: you're getting tons of eyeballs but the eyeballs spend what little money they have on ring tones and beer.
But, I've never done any real Internet marketing stuff so I don't speak from firsthand experience.
Right, you don't count on Digg to generate conversions or repeat views or anything like that, because almost by definition, they're the sort of people that flit from news story to news story and never go deep into anything.
However, they're also the type of people that like to tell people about their great discoveries on Digg. The Mavens, on Gladwell's Tipping Point adoption curve. They don't spend money, and promptly lose interest a day later, but one of the people they tell may start using your product or telling people.
When we first launched Diffle, we put a game up on Digg to gauge response. We got about 1200 visits off that. Of those, 6 came back later. But one of those 6 must've told their friends, because 6 months later, we were back up at about 1200 visits/month with no additional publicity. (And there it stayed because the site sucked, but that's another issue.)
Your right. I think you need to make a distinction here.
Someone searching for 'stylish coffee machine' on Google is maybe 1% or 2% of selling a coffee machine to given a good product offering & e commerce experience. A digg visitor checking out this super stylish appliance is maybe a 0.1% chance. probably not even that. (same applies for chance of becoming a regular reader or app user or whatever).
This leads people to post a lot about how useless digg traffic is. But that's not entirely true. It has other uses. As nostrademons mentions, they are talkers. they are also bloggers & linkers, commentors on other blogs etc. If someone else brings up the topic, they jump in.
Different types of sites/apps/etc. have different channels that work for them. Digg may be useful in helping some of these along.
A secondary use is validation. Someone's already got a Google Office Account. They copy paste a piece of their spreadsheet on to it every month to share with 3-4 people. They then read a digg on how awesome Google Office is & how this blogger is ditching MS altogether. maybe this'll push them to write up their next proposal on G! Docs. etc. etc.
It's not 'conversion' traffic. But it still might be useful.
Comments
I have no idea. But say they get 1,000,000 visitors from this stunt, none of whom had ever heard of CodeWeavers before and none of whom will ever pay for another CodeWeavers product again (the folks who read Digg/Reddit/blogs tend not to pay for software ;-)). Then say that each of them tells 5 other people - that seems reasonable based on who I've told, and amounts to 5M people who know about CodeWeavers and didn't before. Then assume a 1% conversion rate. That's 50,000 new customers, and at $40/copy, $2M in additional revenue. Not bad for a publicity stunt.
The problem with Digg traffic is it's garbage. The conversion rate is almost zero. It's not high-quality views. It's like showing ads to college students on Facebook: you're getting tons of eyeballs but the eyeballs spend what little money they have on ring tones and beer.
But, I've never done any real Internet marketing stuff so I don't speak from firsthand experience.
Right, you don't count on Digg to generate conversions or repeat views or anything like that, because almost by definition, they're the sort of people that flit from news story to news story and never go deep into anything.
However, they're also the type of people that like to tell people about their great discoveries on Digg. The Mavens, on Gladwell's Tipping Point adoption curve. They don't spend money, and promptly lose interest a day later, but one of the people they tell may start using your product or telling people.
When we first launched Diffle, we put a game up on Digg to gauge response. We got about 1200 visits off that. Of those, 6 came back later. But one of those 6 must've told their friends, because 6 months later, we were back up at about 1200 visits/month with no additional publicity. (And there it stayed because the site sucked, but that's another issue.)
Your right. I think you need to make a distinction here.
Someone searching for 'stylish coffee machine' on Google is maybe 1% or 2% of selling a coffee machine to given a good product offering & e commerce experience. A digg visitor checking out this super stylish appliance is maybe a 0.1% chance. probably not even that. (same applies for chance of becoming a regular reader or app user or whatever).
This leads people to post a lot about how useless digg traffic is. But that's not entirely true. It has other uses. As nostrademons mentions, they are talkers. they are also bloggers & linkers, commentors on other blogs etc. If someone else brings up the topic, they jump in.
Different types of sites/apps/etc. have different channels that work for them. Digg may be useful in helping some of these along.
A secondary use is validation. Someone's already got a Google Office Account. They copy paste a piece of their spreadsheet on to it every month to share with 3-4 people. They then read a digg on how awesome Google Office is & how this blogger is ditching MS altogether. maybe this'll push them to write up their next proposal on G! Docs. etc. etc.
It's not 'conversion' traffic. But it still might be useful.
You've missed the best part: They now have a million email addresses.