Digg vs Fark: Which drives more traffic?
In many ways, Drew Curtis’ Fark.com was an early version of Digg. Community users could submit headlines and links and a few editors would comb through these and “greenlight” the best to the front page. Digg took it a step further, allowing the community itself to become the editors, letting them decide what becomes popular.
Both are incredibly popular today and can deliver server crashing traffic. But which one drives more traffic? Luckily, Digg has begun displaying the number of “views” on its newly launched DiggBar. Fark has always displayed the number of clicks in its comments section on each item.
To figure out which drove more traffic, I took 10 random front page links from each site that were submitted at least 24 hours before I began collecting the stats. I then averaged the number of clicks for each.
I found that, on average, Digg will drive about 18,920 views on each item, while Fark will drive about 10,759. The number of clicks for both sites varied widely depending on the item submitted. For Digg, the most popular item drove about 43,000 views while the least popular drove a mere 2,226. For Fark, the most popular item drove 17,197 clicks while the least popular drove about 2,700.
Overall, based on this small bit of data Fark’s numbers were more consistent while Digg drove a much wider variance of traffic. On average though, Digg drives almost twice the number of pageviews as Fark.
Digg may be a better tool for those focused on information concepts and deliverable numbers, but Fark is a destination.
I’ve been Farking for over two years now and I keep coming back because it has the flavor of a community – an often sophomoric and sometimes bloodyminded one, but better that than an impersonal floating link-fest where no one remembers anything anyone says.