Yes, Digg produces the majority of the traffic resulting from a front page Digg story, but is Digg the only reason servers bite the dust when a story is popular on Digg? Or are Digg Leechers helping out?

When a story makes it to the front page of Digg, the result is a feeding frenzy of readers from across the planet trying to access the stories contents. The result, often times is too much traffic for the unsuspecting site of the original story, and quite frequently the server goes down, AKA the Digg effect. But how much of the blame should Digg really take for all these spontaneous server bombs? I’ve seen numerous stories hit the front page of Digg, and show up within minutes on a variety of other sites that leech stories from digg’s front page.

Front page Digg stories that show up on parallel social media sites could be the result of a lot things. There could be (and probably are) users out there that contribute stories to more than a few social media sites, resulting in the same stories submitted to multiple sites almost simultaneously. There are sites that hang back and only post Digg’s most popular stories as they make the front page. Some even in an almost real-time fashion. The fact is, the front page of Digg is a perfect SOURCE for sites to retrieve urls to popular stories. Why? Not only are they after traffic, but If a story makes it to the front page of Digg, it has been put to the test, and it’s proven to be quality content. Think of it as a real-time 800,000 person poll. “Do you think this is good content? Yes or No?” If it lands on Digg’s fron page the answer is Yes, and other sites realize how valuable these stories are, even if they have to wait a little longer than a Digg user.

Some sites that leech popular Digg stories:

Reddiggulo.us
Digglicious.com
Doggdot.us

Notice the “live” feature on Digglicio.us. (just like Digg Spy)

Related Posts:

1. Tapping Digg as a resource for Free Advice from Working Professionals
2. Google finds Digg stories Faster than Digg
3. The Diggtionary
4. Digg: Even with a Misspelled Title, Quality Content Prevails.
5. If you’re not reading comments, You’re missing out on a potential wealth of information.
6. Great, We get “BigSpy” when all we wanted was a “Keep Digging” button.