On July 28, I Digg user submitted one of my blog postings to Digg. The following day, the submission had reached over 1000 "diggs" or votes from other users. I'm going to describe some of the results from receiving this Digg.
First off, the submission was for an article I wrote about Digg. The day after the submission, this site received an additional 5000 page views. For me, that's a pretty good increase. On the AdSense side, however, there was no benefit. I made more every day last week including the previous Saturday. My guess is that 1) the article wasn't particularly good for ads which meant that any that displayed likely had low payouts and 2) Digg users suffer from ad blindness i.e. they generally don't read ada or even see them. I suffer from item 2 myself and continue to be amazed at the vast amounts of money that web advertising generates.
The biggest benefit so far is that, according to Feedburner, I have many more subscribers to my RSS feeds. This conclusion is based on just a single day of analysis from Feedburner so it is quite possible that the number will go either up or down. If I had to choose between getting a bump in ad revenue for a couple of days or getting a bump in RSS feed subscribers, I'd pick the latter.
And one minor item that I hadn't considered before. Because Digg lists the most popular posts for "this week" rather than the past 7 days, if you get Digged at the end of the week, you'll lose out on the benefit of being on the weekly list. Friday's Digg is already gone as it looks like Digg considers this to be a new week already. A similar thing applies to being Digged at the end of the month with the added disadvantage of having to compete with items that have been on the list from the beginning of the month and have many, many more Diggs.
Anyway, that's it for my analysis. I'd like to close by welcoming all the new subscribers from Digg and any other social bookmarking site that came by on the weekend.
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I played about with Digg about 6 months ago. As you describe, the traffic was excellent, but Ad blindness was apparent. I think I can count on the one hand the number of clicks on ads from Digg referrals, and in fact Stumble, too.
If you want people to click on AdSense, I think it's pointless leveraging Digg or any social network.