Todd Wasserman
Amy Vernon still recalls the first time, two years ago, when a story she posted on the social news site Digg became popular. She had promoted a blog post titled “Why Does Tony Almeida Hate America?” that riffed on the villain from 24, the Fox television series. She watched it jump to Digg’s front page, leading to so many hits on her blog that her server crashed. ?It was a really exciting thing,? Vernon says. ?I got an adrenaline rush.? That feat took her about six months and required her to vote in favor of 100 to 200 online stories a day. Eventually, she gave enough thumbs-up to entries of other avid Diggers that they began promoting hers. “It’s just something I did all day long,” says Vernon, who was then working as a journalist but is now a social media marketer.
Social Blade, a site that tracks social media, says Vernon, is now the top female Digger, and ranks her No. 15 in an elite group that is informally known as the Power Diggers. The metrics of rising to the top on Digg are forbidding: Before the site’s latest redesign in August, about 20,000 stories, on average, were submitted daily and fewer than 200 of those made it to Digg’s front page.
Digg pursued a redesign because Power Diggers had come to wield such an inordinate influence on the ranking of stories that new visitors to Digg usually found their submissions all but forgotten?sometimes making the site feel like a members-only club, rather than the communal product of unfettered crowdsourcing.
That insularity flies in the face of the open ethos of social media and may help explain why Digg has ceded ground to other online heavyweights like Facebook and Twitter. It may also explain why Digg, a darling of the online media world just a couple of years ago, may have missed its moment.
“Personally, I think with the rise of all these other new sites, Digg is getting crowded out,” says Christopher Mascari, marketing manager at Gawker Media. “It seems that interest in Digg is waning.” Digg, however, says it is still very much in the game and is trying to regain buzz by transforming itself into an alternative social network. The August redesign, called V4, is the first step. The default page for the new Digg is a “My News” link that shows what stories your friends are “Digging,” a feature intended to put less focus on the site’s “Top News” pages.
The site also now lets top publishers automatically Digg their RSS feeds, resulting in a fire hose of content streaming toward the site that gives Power Diggers less sway in story selection. Digg also did away with a “bury” feature that let “bury brigades,” like the right-leaning Digg Patriots, keep stories they disliked off the site. The site also temporarily eliminated individual rankings that cataloged users’ average number of daily Diggs and the percentage of stories they made popular, stripping power users of valuable measurement tools. “It feels like a lot of these changes were designed to blunt the power of these power users,” says Matthew Ingram, a senior writer with the blog GigaOM.
Digg executives say the redesign, which has been plagued by technical glitches, is less about limiting power users than it is a response to consumers’ desire for customized content. Keval Desai, vice president for product management at Digg, says that people surveyed by the company loved the site’s wisdom-of-crowds ethos but that they also said, “I want to add something curated from my own crowd.”
Personalising the site would also give Digg a chance to do more targeted advertising. “The new Digg will allow us to segment our audience and serve up more relevant content,” says Chas Edwards, publisher and the chief revenue officer. But Digg, based in San Francisco, still struggles against the same force that has made MySpace an also-ran: Consumers don’t have an endless appetite for social networks, and only the most appealing and useful survive. All of which leads to a harrowing question for the company: Will people who are on Facebook and Twitter become regular users of Digg as well, or have those sites already made Digg irrelevant?
When Kevin Rose, a former host on the TechTV channel, created Digg in 2004? before Facebook caught on and two years before Twitter’s start?the idea of a “social news” site, with content chosen by citizen-editors, was novel. For a time, Digg was the hottest Web 2.0 property around. In 2006, Rose was on the cover of BusinessWeek with the headline “How This Kid Made $60 million in 18 Months.” The article quoted “people in the know” who said Digg itself was worth $200 million at the time. That valuation was put to the test in 2008, when Google was said to have offered $200 million for Digg before walking away from the takeover in part because of different management styles, according to the blog TechCrunch.
Digg declined to discuss the Google talks for this article. A Google representative called the reports of a bid “rumor and speculation.” Two months after the TechCrunch report, an investment firm, Highland Capital Partners, plunked $28.7 million into Digg, giving the company a valuation of about $167 million.
Yet those heady days back in 2008 may have been Digg’s high point. Since then, its growth and influence seem to have stalled, and the site is showing some age. While Digg’s audience has grown handsomely worldwide?the company says it has about 30 million unique users a month globally, up from 8.5 million in 2006?its more crucial domestic audience has shrunk.
According to Quantcast, an online audience measurement firm, Digg’s domestic traffic has dropped sharply in recent months, from 27.1 million unique users in April to 13.7 million in July. By contrast, Facebook had 145.2 million domestic users in June, according to comScore. Yet a more pivotal reason that Digg is falling behind, analysts say, is that users are simply spending more time on Facebook and Twitter than they are on Digg. Instead of Digging, many social media users know they can post a story they like on Twitter or Facebook. “My sense is that if people have even heard of Digg now, they know it’s no longer the hot new thing,” says Ingram, the GigaOM writer. “If it’s just a place to post funny links that people can share, there’s lots of places to do that now.”
