Jesse Stanchak

Is Digg still relevant?

By Jesse Stanchak on March 15, 2010 | 4 Comments

Digg made headlines at the SXSW conference this week, announcing significant upgrades to the front and back ends of the site, which allows users to find, share and rate links and scoring the top story in today’s SmartBrief on Social Media. CEO Jay Adelson promises the changes with streamline the experience, making it faster and more user-friendly.

But is that enough? When Digg launched in 2004, Facebook was little more than a cleaned-up MySpace for the college set.  YouTube didn’t  exist. Twitter was just a glimmer in a madman’s eye. Back then, all that sharing, finding and ranking was quite novel. Getting on the front page of Digg used to be quite a big deal back in the day — the equivalent of being a trending topic on Twitter now. The site had the power to direct a lot of traffic back then.

The landscape has changed. Now, every social network can easily be used to share news. Digg’s core community is still quite strong, but in some ways it can act as a deterrent, keeping new members from finding much success in talking up their favorite stories. The changes seem poised to alleviate that problem by taking other social networks into account and trying to make the network less of a front-page-or-bust proposition. But the question remains: In a world with so many other hot social networks, why should an organization invest time in Digg?

Do you use Digg? Do the changes being made to the site intrigue you? Does Digg still have a place in a corporate social-media strategy?

Image credit, K A Arjun, via Shutterstock


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Responses

  • Posted by jdbasketball on March 15th, 2010 at 5:24 pm

    i still like digg! go digg planet!!

  • Posted by Andre on March 15th, 2010 at 5:52 pm

    I don't think it is and I've felt that way for some time now.

  • Posted by Jeremy Person on March 15th, 2010 at 8:29 pm

    Great question and I think what you may be asking is "will Digg still remain relevant in the future". We know it certainly is still relevant today with 40 million visitors, 500 million page views a month, 20,000 daily submissions, 170,000 daily Diggs, and 19,000 daily comments (source: http://gigaom.com/2010/03/11/digg-cassandara/).

    I think online news in general still isn't anywhere as social as consumers of that content want it to be so I still see Digg as very relevant. Other social networks may have more users but many of them are "closed" where Digg for the most part remains "open". I think Digg is smart by tapping into other social networks to improve its algorithm. I found the revenue portion of the article most interesting. Digg most likely is concerned with the amount of content and data Facebook has to draw upon from their users. Likewise Digg surely wants to get as much information from their users to gain insight in the likes and dislikes of its users so they can serve up and sell very personalized ads.
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  • Posted by uberVU - social comments on March 16th, 2010 at 9:14 am

    Social comments and analytics for this post…

    This post was mentioned on Twitter by sbosm: Is Digg still relevant? http://ow.ly/1laqW...

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