Has Digg Dugg its Own Grave?
Oh how the rumors and opinions are flying about Digg and its possible sale. Personally, I’ve never had much use for Digg so I have a more cynical view of it. Regardless of your stance on Digg, the following posts outline some considerations that you might just want to keep in mind.
- Source: Digg hires bank, hoping to sell for $300 million or more
- Why Nobody Should Buy Digg
- Why Digg Isn’t A Good Investment
- Ding Dong, Digg is Dead
- The New Economy of Digg Blackmail
- Following Up: So You Think There Are Digg IM Rings?
In all honesty, I was a casual Digg user at my most active. Reason being, I never saw much value in Digg other than boosting your traffic stats to suck more money out of advertisers. The quality of traffic from Digg is subpar when compared to more niche-specific networks, like Sphinn. I’ve had very few return visitors from Digg, yet I consistently get return visitors from Sphinn, BloggingZoom and StumbleUpon. Also, the referrals I’ve had from Digg have a short lifespan whereas networks like SU have a much longer lifespan for referrals.
For me, Digg was on life-support a year ago. I would like to see Digg reformed and turned into something useful. For me, I will be focusing on social networks that drive more targeted traffic that is more likely to become return visitors.
R.I.P. Digg.
Maybe one of the above articles says the same thing, but the new “digg-like” upstart Mixx (maybe you should check it out) has won over a lot of support by implementing a groups system, which I have to admit I think adds a whole other level to social voting sites.
I do think that Digg needs something similar to continue to be a force long term, so that the community can then segment itself more clearly according to interest. It could then deliver a lot more targeted traffic.
That also reminds me, when I worked on Pligg a while about, it was my plan to introduce full group support to pligg (well documented on their forum!) – wish I had done so now, could have been a trendsetter lol :p
PS. I really should stop commenting on your articles, and start writing replies from my own blog. Old habits die hard I guess!
I’ve been reading up on Mixx and I’m quite interested. To be honest, I’ve just been to busy to setup an account and give it a thorough try. I’ll have to make that a priority.
Yes, you should start using that excellent Conversation feature in OIOPublisher!
BTW… When are you going to let me start blogging about OIOPublisher? It’s an awesome plugin and I think a lot of people would benefit from it.
[...] Has Digg Dugg its Own Grave? [...]
LOL blog away! OIOpublisher needs some users! I wonder if any of your readers would be interested in some Christmas freebies? Free plugin, access etc…
I’m at this very minute writing up a post on my own blog, which will look to compare the different social networking utilities out there for bloggers. I’m probably not even going to consider digg much (maybe just a passing reference), and focus on Mixx instead for the “social voting” sites.
I am new to using social posting sites to gain traffic. I’ve tried Digg and experienced a swarm of traffic for a few days. The mention of Sphinn, BloggingZoom and StumbleUpon is interesting to me.
If they are better sources of traffic, I will sure give them a try. And I think this is an interesting area of discussion.
An interesting article ref is DIGG DEAD. What kind of visitor footfall did u get compared to sphinn. Whatever our thoughts no social bookmark site can be worth that amount of money, surely the bubble is going to burst on them all, just like it did 10 years back on the .net scene, but then again, with microsoft investing 240 million in faceparty for 1.5 % making its total worth 15 billion who can say?
The amount of traffic I’ve received from Digg and Sphinn are comparable. This is most likely due to the nature of this site and not as much a measure of the effectiveness of either service.
I have submitted a story for a different site I use to manage that had over 2,000 Diggs. From that experience, I gleaned that Digg traffic is mostly bounce traffic. I’ve had other Diggs that did decently, albeit not quite as high, that confirmed this speculation.
Conversely, I’ve found that Sphinn traffic tends to stick a little better. I believe this is an inherit trait of the users who are typical of each service. Digg users are more like ADHD users (to which I can relate). The general browsing pattern seems to be like… “Oh look! A butterfly”. Then they are off to another page. Sphinn traffic tends to stay longer and actually read the information on the page as well as other articles on the site. I believe this is due to the user-base that is typical of Sphinn. Most are industry professionals who are more critical of the information they are consuming.
Where I’ve seen the greatest traffic, other than search engines, has been from StumbleUpon. Granted, much of that traffic is bounce traffic, but a significant portion tends to return. Now, we’re talking a pretty small percentage here. Roughly 10% return more than a couple times. At least, that’s been my experience. But, when you’re talking 9,000+ hits, 900 return visitors is a significant number. This average is far greater than I’ve seen from Digg, but is actually less than I’ve seen from Sphinn.
As far as financial worth is concerned… I cannot say. Without knowledge of they’re average advertising rates and regular visitors, I can only speculate. Still, 15 Billion is a LOT of money for a social network. Hell, give me 0.01% of that money for all of my sites combined and I’d be a happy man!
digg is still alive and well. I use it every day along with a couple hundred thousand other people.
Everything in life has an expected lifecycle and dig is no exception to the rule
I gave up on Digg months ago. I won't even get into the Digg lingo or comments.
Mixx is definitely better so far.
Hi
I am working on a site which try to solve many of the problems with digg.com.
You can find it on http://crowdnews.eu.
The main problem with digg is the voting system.
When only top voted stories get on the front page it has
to be a subject that many can relate to,
which result in stories with a low information content.
Crowdnews solves this by using sharing instead of voting.
Every have a personal news page on which they can subscribe to other users and when those users share stories they will appear on the personal news page.
Join me on CrowdNews
knud,
I might just have to check out your site!
The final straw for me with Digg came just last week when I could no longer log into my account. I wasn’t banned, my account page is still active. I didn’t loose my password or forget it, I have that possibility eliminated with software and hard copy backups. Nobody has recently requested a password reset of my account. I just can’t log in anymore.
I didn’t need much of an excuse to say F*&k Digg and walk away. I never was a big fan because of the haughty attitude of many of the diggers there. I find there are much more useful sites that have communities that are helpful and friendly. If you want to know which, look at my sidebar where it says “Out Socializing”. Just ignore the Digg link, it will be removed soon.
Pligg is one of the best Digglike scripts out there imo. Too bad it’s so hard to customize the templates.
Digg is lame now, and has been since the buyout and original format changes. everythings censored, except main stream media approved drivel. I got tired of political stories being buried even though they had the most hits. it went from “question establishment”, to purely entertainment based news. imo
they just dont get the intrnetz !