As an avid tech follower, you likely remember the iconic social news site Digg. Let me take you through the fascinating history of Digg – how one visionary founder built a viral platform that shook up how we discover content, only to be later overtaken by even faster-moving competition. This is a story of skyrocketing early success, innovations in crowdsourcing, struggles to keep up with change, and ultimately a legacy that shaped internet culture.
Dawn of a Digital Era
To understand Digg, we have to go back to founder Kevin Rose. A prototypical tech wunderkind, Rose fell in love with computers and programming growing up in 80s/90s Las Vegas. He dropped out of college to join the dot-com boom in 1998 – honing skills at various Bay Area startups. By 2004, Rose decided the time was ripe to try building his own company.
The Concept Emerges
Rose had followed early blogging and realized their great democratic potential – enabling anyone to share ideas globally.
He wondered – what if there was a platform where internet users could submit the web‘s most fascinating content to be evaluated, shared and elevated by fellow readers?
Essentially – crowdsourcing the curation process by letting people vote the very best content to the top.
This idea for a kind of "social news platform" excited Rose. After months of planning, he invested $6000 along with a few friends to buy Digg.com and bring his vision to life.
Launching Digg v1.0
Digg launched on December 5, 2004 with a ridiculously simple design focused solely on core functionality. The front page listed user-submitted stories ranked by popularity. Readers could post links to stuff they found online and "digg" submissions they liked, giving them points and visibility.
There were no ads, no profiles or comments initially – Digg was about sharing discoveries as a community. You felt you‘d found an exciting secret hub where web-savvy folks were unearthing the best parts of this still-new internet thing.
The buzz began as savvy bloggers discovered Digg and shared tales of addictively checking the latest user-recommended stories and contributing their own undiscovered gems. Traffic grew rapidly through 2005 as Digg built a loyal community of self-described "geeks".
Hitting Its Stride
In mid 2005, Digg released Version 2.0 – establishing the essential features that drove its meteoric rise over the next several years.
Key innovations included:
- Profiles – So fans could follow favorite submitters
- Friends Lists – Letting users track friends‘ activity
- Commenting – Enabling conversations about popular stories
- Topics – To browse specific categories like Technology and Science
Digg also topped 36,000 registered users by the end of 2005 – granted tiny versus today, but evidence of the viral potential.
Kevin Rose knew the opportunity to become a true new media juggernaut was right there.
The Glamour Years
Over 2006 and 2007, Digg cemented itself as the online hotspot for internet culture and earned Rose mainstream tech celebrity status.
Digg reached 1 million registered users in mid 2006 and kept accelerating:
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| June 2006 | 1 million users |
| April 2007 | 2 million |
| October 2007 | 3 million |
| Jan 2008 | 4 million |
And traffic numbers told a similar story according to Alexa data:
| Year | Est. Annual Visitors |
|---|---|
| 2006 | 20 million |
| 2007 | 58 million |
| 2008 | 236 million (!) |
Fueled by passionate communities sharing favorite finds, Digg became a beloved daily destination for millions and the posterchild of crowdsourced curation.
Oh and Digg‘s treasure trove of user-submitted stories was gold for thirsty blogs looking to piggyback viral stories and drive their own traffic.
Business Model Shifts
Digg originally rejected advertising in favor of focus on growth. But by mid 2006, it was clear this social community had amazing commercial potential if monetized correctly.
Digg announced adding Google Adsense units in July 2006 with Kevin Rose explaining:
"When we launched the site two years ago, we didn‘t have a business model built into it...[But] over the past year, we‘ve realized Digg has the potential to be a very profitable business."Initial ads were designed to blend into the sleek Digg aesthetic. But in 2007 Digg began direct sales to advertisers wishing to sponsor entire topic pages. Major brands like Sony, Nike, eBay and Amex took notice.
And later a secondary market emerged for "pay per influence" campaigns using Digg‘s firehose of dedicated readers to spread brand content wider.
Cracks Emerge
After peaking in 2008, Digg‘s meteoric growth stalled. The site remained hugely popular but started struggling to innovate under the weight of legacy features and code.
Meanwhile, a new generation of competing social aggregators were catching fire by supporting modern features and communities Digg lacked:
- Reddit – Its subreddit model better empowered niche communities
- Facebook – 90% of sharing was now via News Feeds not old-school submission platforms
- Twitter – THE emergent source for real-time conversations around content
These trends were reflected in shifting traffic patterns:
| Year | Est. Digg Visitors | Est. Reddit Visitors |
|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 30 million | 13 million |
| 2011 | 22 million | 35 million |
| 2012 | 15 million | 56 million |
Digg just couldn‘t keep pace with changing reader habits and aggregator rivals offering sleeker, more modern experiences.
Yet it still had millions of loyal users – including myself! – who treasured its iconic platform despite the dated code.
The Falldown
In 2010, Digg announced an ambitious months-long rebuilt dubbed Digg v4 to try reclaiming its industry leadership.
The new Digg would supposedly combine the best of old Digg‘s crowdsourced popularity with personalization features from trendy rivals. Digg even recruited hotshot Google engineer Anton Fedchenko to lead the drastic makeover.
On August 25, 2010, the radically reinvented Digg finally launched…and immediately crashed hard. Veterans used to Digg‘s spartan functional focus hated the more visual v4 design that felt messy and slow. Key sorting algorithms were also totally changed in favor of surface-level clicks over community curation.
Within weeks, traffic plummeted. publishers saw their referral numbers decimated with former big fans like TechCrunch declaring it DOA. Determined long-time users tried rallying support via petitions to rollback v4 but the company pressed on.
In early 2012, after another failed redesign and revenues diving fast, Digg was sold piecemeal to NYC technology publisher Betaworks for just $500k.
legacy: The Thrill Was Worth It
Today a smaller but dedicated community still shares discoveries using a streamlined modern Digg that rediscovered its roots.
For me, those early years chasing exhilarating crowdsourced epiphanies represent the first innocence of a web where new digital experiences felt revolutionary.
And Digg‘s founder walked away proud of the ultimately fleeting moments this iconoclast platform ruled internet culture saying:
“allowing the people to control the front pages was always the mission. And when Twitter and Facebook came around and achieved that, I think in a lot of ways for Digg, mission accomplished.”The internet moved on. Newer shinier objects emerged. But for a while my friends, Digg tapped into the glorious chaos of a web still filled with endless possibility.
