I think the likes of Reddit, Buzzfeed, etc. In what other ways might they have engaged their community members without sacrificing the UI their users had grown to love? Raphael, you are the only HBS student who could mention 4chan twice in a submission for class. You mentioned reddit, for example. Furthermore, from then on, everytime reddit has tried to pull levers to monetize their 7 billion page views a month, the community has kicked and screamed and threatened to leave.
Although I much prefer reddit to buzzfeed, as an investor, I would take buzzfeed over reddit. Thanks Alan! As I mentioned in my 1 point, one of the key challenges of digital platforms is that the users will try to abuse the system, and 4chan is a good example of that. Regarding the investment side, I agree that it is still hard to see how money will be generated from these websites. But then again, everybody said the same about Facebook during the IPO, and the stock is much higher now than it was before!
You must be logged in to post a comment. Skip to content. The HBS Digital Initiative brings together perspectives across disciplines to help people understand how technology is transforming organizations and the greater world. Want to learn more about technology and organizations? Email Password Remember Me Lost your password? Assignment: Digitization Challenge. Previous: The Garden of Edyn. While Digg came out and said these accounts were only used for testing purposes, the damage had already been done.
By February , Reddit had managed to take over Digg in terms of traffic numbers. A month later, Rose announced his resignation from Digg. Days prior, reports had emerged that showed him not using his own Digg account for weeks or months at a time. In August, Digg had managed to completely restore version three.
Unfortunately, nobody really cared anymore. In July , after months of trying to survive, Digg announced that it had been sold after all. Betaworks, soon after the acquisition commenced, announced that it would relaunch Digg. On July 31st, , the new Digg was unveiled to the public. The new Digg had more of a Medium appeal by visually promoting stories. Instead, its new ranking algorithms were taking a mix of social and behavioral data, such as Facebook or Twitter metrics, into account.
The latter even allowed them to make money through one-time payments of apps that would like to be promoted. The team also took advantage of the failure of others. In , the company even began to introduce its own original content, a move away from simply sharing external sources.
Across , Digg added Digg TV, which enabled users to watch videos on the platform. Andrew McLaughlin, a Betaworks managing partner who had been acting as CEO since its acquisition, moved to the role of executive chairman.
Over the coming years, Digg continued to add some new features, such as chatbots on Facebook and Slack as well as raising money from USA Today. Then, in April , ownership changed hands once again. BuySellAds, a Boston-based advertising company, purchased Digg including all technological assets as well as its editorial team for an undisclosed amount.
These days, Digg continues to surface its own curated stories as well as external news sources — just not with the relevance it once had.
The biggest reason why Digg ultimately failed were the poor product decisions made by its founding team. Most notably, its introduction of version four alienated a significant number of its users. The redesign simply changed or even removed many of the previously beloved features. On top of that, Digg also began to favor publishers over actual human users. As such, publishers could essentially dictate and push the news stories that they wanted to have exposure to.
The whole premise of Digg was that users and independent moderators would take care of the curation to only surface the most interesting and relevant stories. In the past, Digg had also made some other questionable product choices, such as the introduction of its Digg Bar, amongst others. However, due to the superiority of its product and the lack of alternatives, it never really led to any significant exodus.
On the one side, Facebook slowly began to take the world by storm. As a result, users began spending more and more time on social media sites. Digg tried to counter this by introducing various social features, such as the ability to follow other users, yet the experience on Facebook was just so much better.
Around late , Twitter also emerged as a meaningful competitor. More and more people began using it to receive and consume news apart from being able to better engage with others through tweets. At the same time, there was always the looming shadow of Reddit, which had launched a few months after Digg. For the longest time, Reddit struggled to compete against Digg, in large parts because it had been under corporate ownership.
However, Reddit continued to stay true to its user base despite pressure from its corporate overlords. Co-founder Alexis Ohanian also spoke frequently to the community to explain any change it was undergoing or the decision it made.
For instance, when Reddit needed some cash to fix its site in the summer of , the community responded by paying for 9, subscriptions in just 10 days.
When Digg had its version four fiasco, Reddit was essentially at the right place during the right time to scoop all those users up. On top of that, more niche communities, including 4chan and Hacker News, began popping up. Rob Malda, founder of Digg competitor Slashdot, joined the Post around the same time. But shortly before the deal closed, the Washington Post decided it didn't want the Digg website itself. The Post didn't want it. Digg's investors might have gotten more money if they'd auctioned the domain off to a content mill.
However, McLaughlin says, "we made an emotional appeal that we would build something cool that they would be proud of. The Digg board accepted the Betaworks offer in mid-June That meant Betaworks had to scramble. The old company was planning to shut them down on August 1. So Betaworks had about six weeks to create a new Digg. The company already had an existing product, called News. Engineers and designers from that project could be tapped to build the new Digg.
The company decided to ditch the user voting system that had been the hallmark of the original Digg. The Digg user community had become too acrimonious — and the front page too spammy — to be salvaged. Instead, the new Digg would use a combination of software and human editors to decide what would go on the home page. In some ways, this marked a return to the "portal" vision that the original Digg had sought to replace. But this was a portal with a lot more intelligence under the hood.
Betaworks has developed a sophisticated set of software tools to scour the web for interesting content and then use a variety of signals — including attention on social media sites like Twitter — to judge which articles are most interesting. The software produces a feed of promising candidates that are then curated by human editors. And in another way, Digg is the anti-portal. Portals were created in an era where it was hard to find interesting stuff to read online.
They aimed to cram as much useful content as possible on one page. In contrast, the Digg team prizes simplicity. There's too many stories, too many blog posts, too many status updates, too many tweets. Too much demanding your attention. In contrast, he said, "the theory of Digg is to build something that's very clean, very pristine.
It was pretty good, but it was a little bit behind. It added up to something that was boring. That's when we realized we needed an editor. Betaworks hired David Weiner, a journalist who was an early employee of the Huffington Post, as Digg's editor.
Today he manages a small team that — with a lot of help from software — decides what will appear on the site. Weiner knew he faced a big challenge salvaging Digg's tarnished brand. By , Digg had suffered from years of bad press. In many peoples' minds, the sale of digg. We have a sense of humility. We can laugh at ourselves,'" Weiner said. For example, during the new Digg's first month, President Obama did an "ask me anything" post on Reddit.
Obviously, Digg couldn't compete with that kind of star power. So it responded with humor instead:. Users appreciated this self-deprecating approach. They also appreciated the eclectic fare Weiner and his team began surfacing at digg. Slowly, the site began to regain user trust, and traffic grew. Alex Taylor is one Digg veteran who has warmed to the site's new incarnation. By Louis Kroeck. Revenue Model Digg originally was not monetized in any fashion and the site made no revenue.
Raising Capital Digg has undergone many efforts to raise funds for the company including a multimillion dollar venture capital raising effort in Decline In Digg updated to Digg version 4 and eliminated the prior versions of their service.
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