Digg is toast : the biggest Web 2.0 failure to date
October 26, 2010
Evidently the evidence is mounting that Digg might be ending as an ongoing concern within a matter of a year or two. in the past 24 hours they have announced a 40% staff reduction and it’s been exposed that the social media website has been gaming their own system by fraudulently promoting items to the main page. Further alienating their user-base.
Dozens, if not hundreds of bogus accounts owned by the social media site that robo-digg items has been discovered, leaving many suspecting that companies and partners of Digg are “paying to be on the main page”. In other words the site went from a social media user generated website to nothing but listings of advertising.
Take it from this author, I’ve been though the 1990′s .com boom to .com bust, I’ve been though the social media explosion to implosion. Digg is toast.
I give it 24 months max to be the Lycos of social media or just go away.
The only thing supporting the site is Microsoft’s payments to the company, and even then it’s questionable as Microsoft’s heavy handed tactics against any “anti-Microsoft” articles are part of what started the problem.
In the words of Marc Andreessen circa 1990′s “We know what happens to Microsoft Partners”
We do Marc, We do.
Digg’s new Logo
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Digg “now tied” with ihatemen.org in traffic
October 4, 2010
“Traffic from Digg has fallen by 97% year on year, and by 86% since Digg 4 went live.” according to Tech Radar
This puts the site in the realm of nich sites like ihatemen.org in terms of traffic, a bitch fest website that allows women to scream about what happened on the last night date.
This is an epic failure for Digg. Granted ihatemen.org receives a fair amount of highly targeted traffic. It’s all female and single / recently divorced… basically pretty bitter women. But in no way should a site like that challenge a social media outlet for a niche like that.
But alas that is the state of affairs now. It’s a wide open now. Generally as in any industry there can be multiple players. But with the epic collapse of Digg it leaves Reddit as the only player in town.
This is generally unsustainable, however Mixx and the others failed to capitalize on the failure of Digg, hence leaving millions of users with no place to go.
Enjoy the new reality, quick someone make a Digg version 1 (2 or 3) clone and you’ll do fine.
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Digg is dead
September 16, 2010
Is the social media site, Digg.com dead? Seriously Kevin, you should be embarrassed. You took all of what Digg was, and turned it into FFA for large sites that get auto submitted.. This isn’t what made digg a valid site, what made digg valid was the concept of user submitted content.
As it stands now no user submitted content is promoted, you turned Digg into Google news.
I know I am talking to deaf ears, as this post is user generated and most likely will not get promoted on digg, but seriously you took a great site and shit on it.
It’s terrible what happened, it’s like watching the downfall of a great startup. You should have never veered from the original mission.
Well the history books will write how Digg V4 killed the company.
Enjoy the screenshot.
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The only positive to Digg’s new redesign
September 1, 2010
Evidently there is one positive outcome for the new Digg redesign. They didn’t import over the Microsoft imposed site ban list.
Literally to the joy of Linux users, the site sqlspace.com (The one Digg banned back in 2007 for hosting a screen shot of Ubuntu being featured on Windows Marketplace.) is now allowed to be submitted.
It was a censorship case that Digg was standing on the wrong side of, but of course they had to do as their Microsoft sponsor required. That meant for a period of roughly 5 months there were no negative stories about Microsoft, and all stories that were submitted were either buried or literally banned. Such as Sqlspace.com for hosting the below screenshot.
Enjoy the new reality.
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Digg’s new design – epic failure
August 30, 2010
Open Letter to Digg and Kevin Rose,
This letter is on behalf of the millions of Digg users that were greeted on Monday to the latest news on Reddit.
Seriously, attached is the below screenshot of Digg in it’s full glory.
Kevin, If I wanted to go to reddit.com, I would have went to reddit.com. Digg has turned into an RSS reader… and honestly Google News is way better than what you are providing.
I strongly urge you to stop wasting your time and switch back to the former format, buggy as it was, it still wasn’t something that was completely fed by a reddit RSS reader. Something I already have as a Firefox bookmark.
This design is a complete epic failure and most likely will reduce Digg to a forum level trafficked site similar to something like SqlSpace.Com
It was fun while it lasted.
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IE 8 - “Optimized for Digg”
November 6, 2009
Open Letter to Microsoft and Digg,
We are aware of the Advertising relationship between both your respective firms. That being stated, stop treating us like idiots.
See below Screenshot
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Digg Fires 10% of workforce
January 22, 2009
Breaking - Digg has fired 10% of its workforce, and hammered their sales team replacing mass numbers of them. The company blog put this spin to it.
“given the current economic climate, we’ve made the decision to take a more conservative approach …. This means we’ll be taking proactive measures to manage our costs including a headcount reduction in certain areas that are less core to this year’s objectives”
In fact, Digg has fired 10% of their workforce and fired their entire sales staff. Digg has been living in a bubble over the past few years basking in VC money and not really exposed to Recession / Depression whatever you wish to call the economic disaster we are living in.
However their investors are screaming “make a profit” and Diggs solution is to start handing out pink slips. Their major cash cow is Microsoft, a company that just fired 5000 people a few hours ago.
If your major client just dumped 5000 people on the street it’s one hell of a warning sign that your firm is in trouble.
This is what our economy looks like.
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No revenue model Twitter takes out Digg in traffic
January 20, 2009
No-Revenue Model Twitter takes out Digg in Traffic according to Hitwise. This doesn’t surprise us considering all the controversy with Digg, and editorial review for content from Microsoft. So of course this was bound to happen.
The problem we have isn’t really with Digg however, at least Kevin Rose is a paid shill for Microsoft and admits it…. the keyword being paid. The problem we have is with Twitter having massive amounts of traffic and no revenue model to speak of.
There comes a point where the VC dries up, and during the great depression part II you see no more sources of income. Hence the problem.
If Twitter does not find a revenue model, they will eventually have two choices, we doubt they can apply for TARP money.
1 - shut down
2 - find someone to buy them and let them have the problem of finding a revenue model.
So what do you do with millions upon millions of 140 character messages? How do you turn that into money?
Well… the ideas being floated out there are to charge companies to put on a recommended follow list. Might work… considering Dell has been eeking millions from twitter using it as direct mail piece to advertise their specials.
That might work, but don’t think that that will cover their massive SMS charges (like a cell phone carrier will give Twitter an unlimited account for 20 bucks a month.. heh).
We predict eventually they will start charging for their end users when they feel they have met critical mass. Now this might work to an extent as long as the monthly bill is something tiny… like a dollar a month.
5 million users at a dollar a month is 60 million a year (throw in the sponsorships listed above.. you might break 80 million)… the problem they will have is keeping 5 million users paying a dollar a month.. The biggest fear is mass exodus from twitter the second they start charging. It’s not like it’s difficult to setup a competitor. We setup one in a test environment using wordpress, plugins and a download theme.. meaning that the costs to entry are low… really low if you don’t send out too many of those costly SMS.
Twitter is on to something, the problem is we don’t want that something to be bankruptcy.
Twitter’s new logo!
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UNKNOWN*** royally screws up — get’s thrown on main page of Digg
November 16, 2008
EDIT RETRACTION: We initially thought this was the work of CP+B … however it appears it was NOT their work.. (though they do work for Microsoft, it appears it’s limited to other areas) … What agency did this work?
This is bad considering it’s currently on the main page of Digg. .. Some Agency has Microsoft Windows Vista promotional ads.. well.. displaying Apple Notebooks and PlayStation joysticks.. Good Job whoever this firm is…
We know many of you don’t feel this is a big deal, as with Enfatico using Apple Machines for Dell’s account… but this… this is amazing stuff…
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Google to Buy Digg for $200 Million
July 23, 2008
Google is on the verge of snapping up news aggregator Digg for a reported $200m as the search giant continues to bolster its news service… rumors all over the place… today appears to be rumor day…. story developing… Digg and Google refuse to reply to any of our inquires… Other outlets are picking this up as well…
Regardless this is the 4th time we have heard this rumor today… take it for what it’s worth.
Pretty funny to see Google using Microsoft Ads on Digg however…
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