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There is more chatter about the death of one time popular social news site Digg. According to the Guardian, Digg lost a third of its visitors in a month, April 2010 to be specific. I wrote about the troubles the company was having early last month but Website Magazine sums says that “Digg is Deadd“.
“It was a good run, Digg.com. You certainly had a great idea and funneled plenty of Web traffic to opportunistic and manipulative publishers. Alas, the run is over. And it’s not coming back.”
In hey day of Digg, Kevin Rose stopped by one of our events and put on a great show and if anyone could revive Digg it would be him. All the best to him.
This is just the beginning, I believe there will be many many more deaths for Web 2.0 plays as exit windows close (more like vanish) and capital dries up. Most of them have been features at best not something to build a business on.
Tags: digg, social media
Digg, Shmigg. In the early days of the web and Netscape, somebody aptly said it was going to be like the Big Bang, but after all the money, players, and survivors are counted, it would collapse back down from the googles into a reasonable number of sites like Netscape, the Post Office, UPS, and the phone company again. It could happen.
Comment by bozo — June 8, 2010 @ 8:14 PM
You always know something is not right when you see SEO's at search confererences talking about how easy it was to game a site for thousands of links. I never really trusted Digg for the very reason that it was so easy to manipulate for the wrong reasons.
Comment by Fionnd — June 8, 2010 @ 11:13 PM
One of the newspapers add this I clicked more … and found 300+ social tagging sites. With twitter & facebook sucking the O2 out of Web2, guess what happens?
Pity Google Buzz, Yahoo Buzz and whatever is MSN/Windows Live Buzz is called – they have no chance of getting started … except for their 100s of millions of users.
I think the only way to combat this is for the tagging sites to provide some added value or to cooperate somehow, so tagging one place publishes it lots of other places .. otherwise people will Fb Like/tweet all these sites to death!
Comment by Phillip Jain — June 9, 2010 @ 3:55 AM
If it's dead, why is there a digg button at the bottom of this post?
Comment by Ryan Smith — June 9, 2010 @ 7:53 PM
Both WebGuild and Website Magazine are hyping this weak story. Anyone that relies exclusively on Compete is asking for trouble: panel-based services are notoriously subject to sample bias.
So I checked Quantcast which tells a different story: Digg had a big run-up in February in March. This means that the downtrend in April is possibly a return to normal January levels. Why did it rise so much earlier in the year anyway?
Perhaps you might check Nielsen and Comscore and maybe even call Digg for comment before pronouncing some bigger trend which fits a story you clearly already want to tell.
Comment by Domenico Tassone — June 14, 2010 @ 12:35 AM