Many people think that getting on the front page of Digg is pure luck. You submit a story, then either it’s noticed and it gets virally dugg to infinity, or no one sees it and it falls down to oblivion.

This could not be farther from the truth. Digg is using advanced algorithms and at least a dozen different ways to nurture your story and help it reach the front page - if it’s worthy. Never will your story be alone, unattended, and unseen: from the first second it’s submitted and throughout the entire next day, Digg automatically does whatever it can to expose it to people who might find it interesting.

This shows a big degree of maturity from the Digg admins - they’re constantly adapting their algorithms to scale with their user base. Some of the things which I’m about to show you would be superfluous on a small social content site, but on Digg they work perfectly. It’s also one of the reasons why Digg is bigger and more popular than any other social content site.

So, here’s exactly what happens when a story is submitted to Digg.

First phase: the story appears in the upcoming stories. Each Digg category and subcategory has its own upcoming stories section, so while a software related story will probably sink as a rock on the main page, it will stay up much longer in the upcoming stories of Technology - Software. Even if it sinks in the second or third page, there are still users that might see it, so all is not lost.

But, the upcoming stories section has an important feature: Cloud view. In cloud view, you see a much larger number of stories on your screen, and they’re ordered chronologically, but divided by the number of hours which have passed since the initial submission. It’s important to know that this system scales with activity. If there’s a huge number of stories, you might see only the first hour in the cloud view. If it’s early morning in the USA then you’ll probably see stories as old as 6 hours in the first page of the cloud view.

What’s even more important, the stories with votes grow (their font gets bigger) in cloud view. This makes the cloud view a fantastic tool for experienced diggers looking for a new story to digg, because you can easily check out what’s hot in the last couple of hundreds of submitted stories. This system is also dynamic. A story which has 20 votes but it’s far down (for example, older than 12 hours), will be smaller than a story with 10 votes but in the 1st hour. This is very fair - if it took longer for diggers to notice your story, then it probably deserves less attention. Digg is, after all, about news: they don’t want stories which are 15 days old appearing on the front page.

Another way for your story to get noticed is Digg Spy. It’s a dynamic tool that lets you see which stories are being dugg. Many diggers set Digg Spy to show only upcoming stories, which is important, because as your story is submitted, it will appear here. It will sink fast, but it will resurface on top of upcoming stories every couple of minutes for the first half an hour or so. It will also resurface when someone diggs it, attracting even more attention this time. A life cycle of a story in Digg Spy is short, but it can give the story one or two extra votes which are necessary for it to go up.

One should not forget the influence of friends. Digg is not a site for communicating - it’s a site for collaborating. You can’t talk to your Digg friends, but in your profile, under Friends, you can see what they dugg, submitted, or commented on. That’s why it’s important to have friends in Digg. Amongst a powerful network of friends, with many top users, the visibility of a story increases greatly.

Lastly, there are Digg Swarm and Digg Stack, which are much more random in the way they display stories. But many diggers are fascinated by the Swarm and might even digg your story from there, if it shows up. Like in all other Digg sections, it’s possible to look only at upcoming stories in the Swarm and Stack.

Now that we know all this, let’s just do a quick recap of what your story needs to move up past the first couple of hours. Basically past the first hour it should have 2 or 3 votes at least, because it’s going to be harder to notice it in the Cloud or in the Spy. 5 votes in the first hour, for example, is very good, and it means that your story has a big chance of success. Anything over that, and it’s practically a sure shot. This said, have in mind that Digg takes many other things into consideration when calculating all of the above factors. For example, it’s important who dugg the story (top users have bigger influence). So, all is not that simple, and the above numbers are definitely not (and can never be) exact.

To illustrate all this, I’ve chosen two freshly submitted stories in the Technology section, and I’ll show you their life cycle without interfering. The stories are Apple iPod Sales Hit Record; Zune Grabs 10% Share and More Sealand insider photos. To make this more interesting, I didn’t just randomly select these stories. I chose them because I think that the first story is controversial: it has the Apple buzzword, but it claims a controversially big number for the Zune share. Sealand, on the other hand, is a much more neutral buzzword. It might just go places. Let’s see them at the very beginning of their life cycle:

In the second phase, your story is mostly visible in the Cloud. If it gained enough votes in the first hour, it will expand in the Cloud, which will greatly increase the chances of it getting noticed, and thus getting votes, so the farther it falls down in the cloud the bigger it is. If your story didn’t get any larger at all in the Cloud in the first couple of hours, then the chances of it being noticed are diminishing. But if it grew just a little, it might reach 15, perhaps even 20 or 30 votes in the first 6 hours. Very good stories and true breaking news go to front page directly from this phase. But, most stories don’t have that much impact.

Let’s see how our stories are doing one hour later. As you can see, they both have reached the absolute minimum requirements for success, but nothing more than that. Two or three votes show a certain degree of interest from the readers, but I think a little more enthusiasm will be needed to push these stories to front page. At this early point, regardless of the content, the story with 3 votes has much better chances of success.

Now we come to the third phase. After a couple of hours, your story will only appear in the Digg Spy when someone diggs it, and it will sink down on the second or maybe even third page of the Cloud, and probably even further down in the standard upcoming stories view. Not many users go down there, so chances of your story getting that elusive vote is slim. However, it’s still probably visible in its category Cloud. But, most importantly, if the story has reached enough votes, it might show up at the Top Stories in the Upcoming section (which appears only at Digg category root and in the main categories). The lower limit for getting there is around 15 votes, but this can change greatly. This is the ideal scenario: more than 6 hours have passed, and your story was inevitably pushed down by new stories, but it gained a huge amount of visibility in the Top Stories. On the other hand, if your story never reaches the Top Stories, it’s going to be tough. It still might have a decent degree of visibility by getting bigger in the Cloud, even on the second or the third page, but it’s inevitably sinking and thus getting dugg at an increasingly slower rate.

Let’s check out our stories one more time. As you can see, even after three hours the Apple story is where it began. Also, what you don’t see here, is that it was buried a couple of times; probably because the 10% market share for Zune sounds inaccurate. It’s safe to say that it won’t reach the front page, although with Apple being a huge buzzword, you never know. The Sealand story, however, generated some interest, but I’m afraid it’s not going to be enough. It didn’t grow in the Cloud, and its visibility is basically the same as the visibility of any other story in the cloud, even though it has solid 6 votes in the first 3 hours. All is not lost for this story, as it is still high up in the Tech industry news cloud, and Sealand is quite a buzzword at this moment, so some users might reach the story via search. However, it has to start building some momentum fast, otherwise it will fall off the first cloud page without getting bigger, and this is almost certain death. What’s more worrying is the fact that the users who dugg the Sealand story aren’t highly ranked, which might make a difference in the end.

Let’s leave our two (so far) unsuccessful stories and get back to the third phase of the Digg story life cycle. In this phase your story is very vulnerable. Some buries might kick it off the Top Stories. Duplicate stories often get kicked out here. Also, it’s a race with time. It still has to continue to get dugg to get on the front page (the lower limit for this is around 30 votes, but it can get as high as 70 - depending on multiple factors, most notably on who dugg it, and the time elapsed since the story was submitted), but if it doesn’t get dugg fast enough then it will fall off the Top Stories list, and it’s hard to get it back there, unless the wesbite which holds the story already has a great amount of traffic which can create some additional Diggs. Stories can stay on the top list for quite a long time, but I’ve never seen one older than 24 hours. From my experience, around 60% of stories which reach the Top Stories list get promoted to the front page, but it greatly depends from day to day.

*At this point I will revisit the two stories I’ve been following after 16 hours have passed. My predictions is that the Apple story has less than 1% chance of going to front page, while the Sealand story has a 20% chance. *update: almost 12 hours have passed, and the Sealand story is still at 6 diggs. Interestingly, the Apple story got a couple of diggs, so it has 5 votes now. Neither of these stories will reach the front page.

Front page - final phase. Even after your story gets to the front page, Digg continues to look after it. First it’s on the front page of its category and then the Digg front page. Even after it sinks down, if it has a big amount of diggs it might appear on the Top Stories list on the Digg front page, and even after that in the top stories in the last 24 hours, which many diggers use to check on what was hot on Digg lately. Basically, the better your story is, the more visibility will it retain for a longer period.

I hope all of the above reveals some insight on how complex the Digg ecosystem is, and how intricate are the algorithms which make a certain article reach the Digg front page. Ultimately, this means that if the story you submitted has good content (and is not a duplicate), it has good chances of getting dugg, even if there are hundreds of other stories competing for diggs. Have in mind that all these factors change over time, and what’s true today might not be true tomorrow.