In the last six months, the new Digg team has released an iPhone app, an iPad app, a new site design, and an new email subscription product. The momentum is enough for Digg’s new owners, Betaworks, to say that the “Digg effect” — the massive swell of traffic that sites used to notice when a post or page was dugg — is coming back.

Unfortunately, if this is success, I’m not sure what failure looks like:

Digg traffic, according to Compete.com

Digg is careful to say nothing about traffic in its post, but it does say that “we doubled our users.” My guess, given the chart above — and the fact that I’ve worked on web apps with hundreds of thousands of once-active but long-gone users — is that this is not daily active or even monthly active users but simply an overall user count.

Betaworks’ strategy with the new design is to make Digg “fast and thin,” with the thinking that if you “let users go, and they will come back to you.” The strategy may be working with new users — although the current site, with Digg counts of 15, 50, and the low hundreds, would argue otherwise — but it looks like the millions of all Diggers are not coming back to the updated site.

Which is rather ironically, you might think, labelled v.1 on the current site (top left):

That millions of former Digg users are not coming back makes sense, of course, given that after the redesign, Digg is no longer really Digg; it’s just some site with a big history that features content that a few people view and respond to.

Regardless, Betaworks and the new Digg are starting to think about making money.

In an era of native ads like promoted tweets and posts, however, Digg’s strategy isn’t highlighting awesome (and sponsored) content — it’s hyping mobile apps that are looking for users. It seems more than a little random and unconnected to the core products, which is odd given that one of the site’s stated criterion is monetization that  “aligns to the grain of the product.”

The idea is simple: Across mobile, desktop and web, there are lots of great developers building great apps, but most people only ever see a tiny fraction of them. …

So here’s how it works: Each week we select an app to feature on the Digg homepage, and we label it with “Apps We Like.”

But what does that have to do with cool viral content that hip web surfers want to share and upvote? Kinda nothing.

Perhaps the word “yet” is the most operative one in “not dead yet.”

(Digg general manager Jake Levine and I could not connect for his comments before publication.)

That’s what Hurricane Sandy is doing for Weather.com. As panicked coastal residents up and down the Eastern seaboard are wondering what mother nature is going to bring them, they’re going online. And Weather.com is a big beneficiary.

AdClarity, the advertising analytics tool, studied Weather.com for the past three days. It’s clear that big storms mean big traffic … and big ad numbers.

Weather.com is already the biggest and heaviest trafficked weather site in the U.S., an AdClarity spokesperson told me. But in the last week, its already-high traffic has jumped 20 percent.

Wondering how The Weather Company survived? We asked them.

And just yesterday? Almost 30 percent:

Source: Alexa

Weather.com traffic, as guesstimated by Alexa

That’s big news for the advertisers on the site, says AdClarity, who are now accessing even larger swaths of the population. Top advertisers include NationWide, with the insurance giant taking 11.5 percent of the available adspace, Travelers, and Advil.

Source: AdClarity

Travelers’ ad on Weather.com

AdClarity’s snapshot shows how marketers are reacting almost instantly to changing circumstances.

Travelers’ ads, for instance, highlight Hurricane Sandy by delivering almost a public service message: what your emergency kit should contain, how to prepare your home for a disaster, and so on.

Instant tailoring of ads and quick buying to jump on an opportunity shows the possibilities in real-time advertising, in which marketers adjust campaigns on the fly to fit news, trends, and even, in this case, weather.

The challenge in jumping all over advertising opportunities when a disaster is looming, of course, is avoiding the inevitable ambulance chaser comparisons.

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But when it comes to website availability and uptime under crushing Olympic-sized traffic, the race has already begun.

Compuware has been tracking the performance of the top 20 Olympic news sites in countries such as the U.S., UK, Germany, and China for several months. Now that the Olympics are on and the surge of traffic is hitting, some clear front runners have emerged.

“We’re measuring both uptime and availability,” Compuware product manager Lorenz Jakober told VentureBeat. “Then we compare it to the performance of the sites a month ago, which gives us a pretty good metric on what the differences are.”

And those Aussies are definitely feeling the heat. Websites in the basket of news agencies Compuware is tracking, such as ABCnews, 9News, news.com.au, are down between 10-20 percent compared to pre-Olympic traffic:

Source: Compuware

Australian Olympic sites: red, like blood, is a bad sign

For the U.S., measured properties would include sites like NBC.com, ESPN, and Fox Sports. And paradoxically, those sites are doing better than before the Olympics.

Source: Compuware

US Olympic news sites: green is good

“It’s funny actually,” Jacoba said. “Perhaps the Olympic fever hasn’t maybe hit us yet, with the time delay.”

Or perhaps server administrators have increased capacity prior to the Olympics. That’s exactly what the Bleacher Report was doing when I spoke to the company’s vice president of engineering a few weeks ago. That site is expecting to triple ordinary web traffic, and preemptively scaled up its database layer inside Amazon’s cloud. When it comes to serving web pages, the Bleacher Report can add 50 percent more capacity in just 30 minutes.

Perhaps the French should have done something similar:

Source: Compuware

Fo the French, it’s a little comme ci, comme ça

Image credits: Compuware, fstockfoto / Shutterstock.com