Digg is known for drumming up traffic to the sites that are linked from its popular home page. Can it perform for online advertisers too?
According to three of its executives, its recent forays into ads that play along with its vocal, tech-savvy audience are making gains.
When Digg introduced a new toolbar in early April that added a thin strip – known as a ‘frame’ – to the top of pages submitted to Digg, a publisher outcry forced the social media aggregator to back down.
If you needed any further proof that this is an age driven by users much more than publishers, look no further than what’s happening right now with Digg.com, a site you probably think of as a stand-in for all that is user-generated, unedited and anarchic.
Yesterday, New York-based start-up incubator Betaworks raised $2 million in funding for its URL-shortener project, Bit.ly, and spun it out as an independent company.
According to Bob Buch, vice president of business development at Digg, sharing is caring. Or at least it is when it comes to being a successful Web publisher.
In a Wednesday presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, he advised content providers to harness the power of social-networking sites and use “share” buttons (such as Digg’s, of course) to optimize Web traffic.
Looking at a regular graph of traffic data from Digg and Facebook, it would be easy to assume that Digg is lagging far behind Facebook’s staggering growth. However, Compete just produced a very different graph that compares traffic at Digg and Facebook since their respective launches, and according to this data, Digg is actually doing better than Facebook.
Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, Delicious. These are all social sites that are well known for sharing stories with a massive amount of people. Yahoo Buzz? Not so much. But apparently, it’s also in the business of sharing stories. And today is its first birthday.
The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today: It’s 1996, and you’re bored. What do you do? If you’re one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you’d do in 2009: Go online. Crank up your modem, wait 20 seconds as you log in, and there you are–”Welcome.”
The year of hope and change is certainly off to a grim start in the tech world. Last week alone saw layoff announcements from stalwarts like Intel and Microsoft, as well as Web 2.0 companies like Digg, just to name a few.
It happens several times a day now. Ever since I opened my Twitter account approximately three months ago, the follow alerts have been gradually increasing in frequency to the point that they clutter up my email inbox if I don’t clean them out often enough.
Has news site Digg really made no progress in two years? That’s what you’d have to conclude from the value investors are placing on Digg after its most recent investment: $164 million.
Why is Kevin Rose on a publicity binge? In the past two months, the founder of headline-voting site Digg has garnered two magazine covers. There he is with a smoldering leer on local San Francisco magazine 7×7.
Early every morning, I open my Web browser and load up a half-dozen “aggregator” sites: Techmeme, Memeorandum, Real Clear Politics, Google News, the Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post. This is my first sortie into the day’s news, the way I orient myself to what’s going on in the world now that I no longer subscribe to a print newspaper.
Digg founder Kevin Rose had a message for the audience at the Future of Web Apps conference on Thursday: It’s time to grow up.
This morning a rumor about Steve Jobs having a heart attack started circulating. The person who started the rumor submitted it to MacRumors using an anonymous proxy IP address. I saw the report right when it was submitted and after some brief research dismissed it.
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