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Digg To Microsoft or Google? Research Shows 52% of Diggers Block Ads
Update: Digg CEO Jay Adelson calls the rumor, "completely inaccurate"
Rumor out last night is that Digg is looking at offers from Microsoft and Google in the $200-225 million range. Frankly it’s simple — if either company acquires Digg, the mass exodus will begin swiftly. Henry Blodget suggests that Digg is "past its prime."
Roi Carthy, Tamar Weinberg and I had the beginnings of a good conversation about the "worth" of Digg in a cab in Austin yesterday. Unfortunately the cab took every shortcut possible which limited the discussion.
My take is simple — the early bird got the worm and now the rest of us are left to fight over a tiny chance of getting on Digg. We also know that a few sites control Digg. Digg today is not the same as Digg a year ago. While it can still help you find good stories and sends a massive amount of traffic to a site, the ability to generate inbound links and new subscribers has basically become non-existant.
Diggers are known for not clicking ads, and in fact, on our last frontpage Digg (which was weeks ago), we calculated that 52% of the visitors coming from Digg have ad blocking software in place.
With all of that said, I still believe Digg is an important tactic for social media growth where CPM-driven advertising is in place. I enjoy using Digg (mostly in the upcoming section) and I certainly enjoy receiving the traffic when we make it to the frontpage.
That is quite an interesting statistic. I think that it’s not so bad that they don’t click ads, they are looking specifically to read your article and nothing more. If they like it they will subscribe and visit repeatedly.
Here is an article I wrote on how bloggers can bypass adblock plus filters and other ad blocking software.
Publishers: How To Bypass Ad Blocking Software
Enjoy,
Mark
A new wave of social media sites is on its way. Sites such as http://www.floort.com where the users’ opinions are welcomed, rather than shunned. Digg is just a news re-director. Also on Floort, links are not rel=nofollow appended so inbound links actually work.
Watch out Digg. Your days are numbered.
Digg may not be the great earner, but I dont think that means its past its prime.
Even though Digg may be “past it’s prime”, it certainly isn’t going anywhere. It’s still a vital part of today’s social media and can be changed a bit to suit the growing trends of the social media marketing industry. It will be interesting to see who acquires it and what exactly they may do with it.
With everything going on…
Will the Google, Microsoft battle over Digg hurt the users?
http://webpoet.wordpress.com/2008/03/08/to-the-users-of-digg-get-up-stand-up/
Allen are you saying that you didn’t like the fact the cab driver took shortcuts? must have been a new cabbie or on his last day :p
I don’t think digg is worth more than 80 million. You are right its just become a mainstream blog aggregator these days.
Sad to say, I agree. I much preferred Digg when it was tightly focused on tech. Now, it’s just a general interest mess. I still enjoy it occasionally. But, not nearly as much as I did about 18 months ago.
How did you calculate who wasn’t clicking your ads? I could see taking the total visits to that page and subtracting the ad impressions but we both that wouldn’t be very accurate at all.