Cameron Olthius recently posted about the rise of “made for digg” sites, a phrase coined by Ethan Kaplan, who points out Knuttz as an example. Alister Cameron looked into the Knuttz site and gives a breakdown of how this site funnels visitors in such a way to encourage digg votes.
Knuttz is basically a blog that shows clever photographs and interestingly enough, has had 14 stories hit the front page of digg in about the past two weeks.
Alister speculates whether Knuttz might be gaming digg or not and makes some interesting observations. Knuttz creates a “digg funnel” by adding a solicitation from each photo detail page to a specific page which has the familiar digg vote badge on it.
You don’t really see any digg badge anywhere on the site until you get funneled to the “focus” page. All the photo detail pages link to the “focus” page, which is in contrast to what most blogs do when they place the digg badge on every blog post. That dilutes the voting. The digg funnel drives traffic to one focus page with a digg badge on it. This focuses any voting to one particular “story”. Except it’s not a story, it’s just a clever photo.
The observations Alister makes are pretty interesting for those who are interested in seeing how sites are suddenly benefiting from digg traffic in a big way.
Muhammad Saleem says there’s nothing wrong with made for digg sites, “…it is not Digg‚Äôs fault that more people want to read about Britney‚Äôs marital life than the genocide in Sudan”.
That’s true, and it’s something potential investors and marketing partners should consider that are looking at digg. Digg is becoming (or has become) much more more of a “techie tabloid” than anything else and there’s certainly a robust community behind it. There’s a tremendous opportunity for digg style communities to be developed that address the interests of other news types and industry topics.
What are your favorite digg copycat sites? Have you picked up on other “made for digg” sites or clever gaming of digg?
