I’ve written several times over the past month about the new Digg. First I wondered if the new Digg was just a faster version of Twitter and I also explained why Digg won’t (and shouldn’t) change.

Last week the big Digg news was around a few images of Digg’s stats published by Hitwise. Many bloggers posted the graphics in hope of hitting the Digg frontpage and many said that the drop in traffic was because the Digg users left the site after the recent changes. My belief is that the traffic is down because of issues with Digg’s inbound SEO traffic. Andy Beard has a good look at the SEO changes that may have resulted in Digg’s lower traffic. I still believe aggregators like Digg don’t belong in Google – just the source content should be in Google.

How much do you think it costs to get a story to the Digg frontpage? I’m not talking about the blogs that have big enough Digg loyalty (or a default slot) that can get their content to the Digg frontpage on their own. I am talking about the sites and brands that have to pay a “consultant” for a push on Digg.

Earlier this month I received the email below from a pretty high ranking Digg user.  For a fee of $150, the firm guarantees they will get my content to the Digg frontpage. If they can’t get it to the frontpage, I don’t pay. I wonder with this most recent traffic hit, will the cost drop to say $100?

It’s good to know they will make sure the content is “Digg-worthy” and not just promote anyone who pays the fee. I have removed the contact info because it’s not important for this discussion.

Its every bloggers dream to get his post featured on Digg’s front page, but its sad to see that most of them get less than one digg on their submissions. The top 100 Diggers were lucky as they started early, but today its not a wise strategy to go about building a powerful Digg profile organically with the help of influence. Firstly its very time consuming and if Digg ever gets to know that your self promoting, you’ll risk loosing all your hard work.

My solution for this was to swap diggs with other diggers looking to promote their submissions, I started to build my network by investing hours everyday and within just two weeks I had a network big enough to take my blog viral in almost every platform, at that moment I felt that this was possible by everyone and anyone, but I realized my mistake in a few days, when I had to spend hours doing social votes for others.

The success with this doesn’t only depend on the number of Digg’s but the type of content you deliver, no matter how much you pay us, the content is what we consider first.

You can send us your link to this mail and we’ll review it, it must not be old and the content must be solid to make it work out, if we fail to take it to the front page then we’ll surely give you a refund.

If we fail to take it to the front page then we’ll surely give you a refund.

Payment: $150

Find more stories about: Digg, Social News

This will be my last post about the new Digg site. I’ve found watching the new site go live and the reactions from both passionate Digg users and the blogs that have reaped the big cash rewards of a busted algorithm fascinating. I think there is one set of topics that hasn’t been discussed and so this post will conclude my coverage.

Why Digg Won’t Change

I struggled with using “won’t” or “shouldn’t” for this section. Apparently this new release marks the fifth time Digg users have gone on the offensive for changes to the social news (?) service. With a new CEO at the helm as of today, Digg could be trying to position the service for growth. I think that Digg is instead trying to change in the hopes of getting fresh acquisition interest. The old model was stale for Digg and many early Digg users have grown up and moved on. Other services like Twitter and Facebook have passed Digg for news sharing supremacy in a short amount of time.

For Digg to start to add more cylinders (or is it batteries?) to their engine, they needed a freshness overhaul. Two years ago I wondered if Digg was looking to be acquired by a media outlet. I think the new version positions Digg as a good acquisition target for a media service like Comcast.

In just a week, all of the major tech blogs are pumping Digg bigtime – something that hasn’t been seen since Twitter launched their first buttons and blogs pushed their Digg buttons to the recycle bin. This renewed publisher interest is exactly what Digg needs again – they need visibility and inbound (non-Google) traffic.

Would Digg feel a big hit if all of the top Digg users left the site permanently? With the new auto-generated RSS feed option that most of the popular blogs are using to feed ALL of their stories (even sponsor thank you messages), the “discovery” model isn’t as important anymore.

What I find interesting is that today the company announced some algorithm changes and it sure looks like we are back to the old “ars and wired” dominated home page. What is shocking is that there have been close to zero non-tech stories to hit the new homepage since the launch. I mean don’t the New York Yankees deserve some frontpage love?

I am not sold that this new Digg will be able to significantly increase their userbase because for a user to be excited about Digg, their friends and sources also need to be using the service. And the average Internet user already talks to their friends and gets their news via a variety of other popular social networking services. I do, however, strongly believe that Digg will increase their traffic from a larger percentage of their current userbase. People who haven’t used Digg in years will stop by after being hammered on a blog which pumps Digg. These users will contribute heavily to the growth of Digg and what I believe will be an eventual sale within the next 18-24 months.

The newly-hired CEO sure does have his work cut out for him! Does Digg move forward and ignore the screaming of their most passionate users? Or does Digg do what a small but most engaged set of users want right now?

Who Moved My Cheese?

Since the new Digg version 4 site went live, I’ve spoken with several top Digg users about the changes. And over the years I’ve spoken to many of Digg’s top users. One thing seems to always come up in nearly all of the discussions…that is the user is getting some sort of benefit for driving traffic to stories. Typically that benefit isn’t direct cash payments as I believe that’s banned by Digg. But many of the top digg users provide “consulting” services which include traffic and link generation.

If these “consultants” are used to going to their one location for quick huge traffic bursts, now that the cheese is gone, is this the reason why so many Digg users are outraged that a few blogs owned the home page? While there have apparently been changes to the algorithm so that one source can’t own the home page, will the cheese ever return for this set of consultants?

Etc

As a side note, I mentioned on Twitter last night that it would be awesome if the blogs that benefited from the busted algorithm donated the extra ad dollars they earned to a worthy tech cause. I doubt anyone will step up- but wanted to throw it out there as a suggestion.

Find more stories about: community, Digg

Google launched their new Gmail Priority Inbox today. The service helps push the important emails to the top. So I wondered, what if Gmail Priority Inbox worked like the new Digg version 4 currently works?

Find more stories about: Digg, gmail, Google, Google Priority Inbox

I’ve got two more Digg stories to write — actually I only had one for tonight but then I noticed something worth sharing. It’s certainly been an interesting week for the social news aggregator. They traded oxen for wheels and sold some sheep to keep the new Cassandra servers running as they cross the river. We’ve heard from our close sources that several tech blogs have sent Digg a whole gaggle of new oxen but so far we are unable to confirm.

Top Digg user JD Rucker put together a chart showing the last 118 stories to make the front page and which sites grabbed the highest percentages. Check out his blog for the full chart. Some notes:

• Mashable owned the home page with 15% of the stories – and if you change the clock to only Friday, my guess is that the percentage would be closer to 70%. Mashable also wins for “most unlikely story to hit the frontpage” with their “thank you sponsors” post making the Digg frontpage on Friday evening – now that’s a thank you if I ever saw one!
• Leo Laporte grabbed 8% of the total stories – a lot of which go to his Google Buzz feed (I thought he quit Buzz??) – perhaps this promotion is due to Leo holding the 2nd most popular spot for default users

My suggestion to Digg is simple – if the algorithm that promotes stories is broken, turn off the front page until you get it fixed. While it looks like today’s tech blog to promote is RWW (yesterday was TC), it just looks bad on Digg to not have some sort of variety — and I’m not even talking about tech blog variety – I am talking about overall variety.

The benefit to turning off the frontpage while making the corrections is that you will force users to “learn” how to use the new MyNews function – a function which blogger Robert Scoble says is his favorite part of the new Digg.

On the Leo Laporte show last night, interim CEO Kevin Rose noted that it will be another week before all of the technical issues with the new site are fixed.

Maybe what will get them to move on fixing the home page quickly is that nearly all of the popular stories currently on the home page are links to Reddit (and Reddit links out to the actual stories). It appears that Reddit created a Digg account and is using the auto-publishing function to push all of the stories that make the Reddit frontpage to Digg. My guess is that this will be fixed as soon as San Francisco workers make it to the office (the time is currently pre-8am PST).

You can see a screenshot of the home page below. Oddly, Gabe Rivera’s tech aggregator TechMeme made the frontpage, something I haven’t seen before as typically you vote for the actual content and not the aggregator.

Find more stories about: content curation, Digg, Reddit

Yesterday I posted some of my comments about the new Digg site along with a video from several of the top digg users (aka power diggers).  I took some time out of my coding session to take a deeper look at the new Digg. What I found is that many of the elements of the new Digg mirror those on Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook). I can say that Digg loads much faster than Twitter and is a lot more polished on the user interface side (something Twitter really needs to fix).

Interestingly, when I visit both Mashable and NextWeb today, both are pushing huge banners to get their readers to follow them on Digg. This follows the same pattern as with the launches of Google Buzz and, earlier, Twitter. Both publishers are defaults on the new Digg and my guess is that we will see continued pumpage (from a good number of publishers) as long as Digg provides the same traffic burst as they did previously. Since these publishers are defaults for new users, they should see an even larger increase in traffic as more of their stories reach (and dominate) the home page (see below for more on this topic).

Let’s take a look at some of the core concepts on Twitter and the new Digg to see where the similarities exist.

Following/Followers

This is the core concept of Twiter – after you setup an account, you can choose to follow people/brands/bots and other people/brands/bots can choose to follow you as well. Digg is using the same verbiage in their newly-released service.

Suggested User Lists (what I call “Default Users”)

When someone writes the book about how Twitter rose to fame, the book can be written in two words (way less than 140 characters). Those two words are Default Users. It was a brilliant move by Twitter (I’m serious). By pimping a select group of users on the new service, it allowed new users to start with content on their page. It also allowed a group of people and blogs to generate massive numbers of followers which resulted in huge traffic and big cash money deals. (we can argue about whether the number of followers equals influence another day) And those traffic numbers helped get the media conversation about Twitter going.

When Twitter launched their default user list, many of the users who helped build the service and were heavy users of the service were left off the list. The same elements make up the Digg suggested user list.

Some fun and interesting notes about the suggested user list on Digg:

• Being active on Digg means nothing as nearly every default user is just auto-publishing with no comments or non-site diggs
• Mashable has 7 feeds as defaults
• Techcrunch isn’t listed as a top default but writer MG Sigler is (might actually be better this way for potential traffic) – Techcrunch is listed as a default in the Tech category. They did add the Digg widget to the blog today so perhaps that might help get them to the top default page?
• iJustine gets a top slot without any community participation – guess she brought Kevin Rose some cupcakes?
• Leo Laporte is listed 3rd – right behind founder Kevin Rose and the Telegraph newspaper. I thought Leo quit social media last week?

Update: within 10 hours of my posting, Techcrunch is now listed as a top default user – that didn’t take long!

This afternoon CEO Kevin Rose has addressed several issues regarding the new site. Regarding the default list, he notes, “Our directory of recommended users will eventually open to the entire world. We will sort users, not on popularity (followers), but based on how good you are at finding/digging content (similar to wefollow.com). This will remove the popularity contest and put the focus on quality diggers.” If he follows the Twitter pattern, he will keep the current list long enough to allow the publishers and friends to get enough followers that changing the list will have no effect whatsoever (just like on Twitter). I am afraid his plan may backfire and hope he considers this issue before it gets too big to fix.

Scraped Feeds

No, no, I’m not talking about the Scraper® here. I am talking about how 99.9% of publishers post links to all of their stories on Twitter. And now Digg allows publishers to do the same thing. On Digg this is called the, “RSS-Fed Autosubmit”. My guess is Digg wasn’t seeing enough content published per day so this option should increase the traffic on Digg. On the top digger podcast, the publishing of entire feeds was probably the biggest topic of discussion. Everyone on the call said they were against this and I agree. I think it’s fine on Twitter but not on Digg. But don’t look for any of the default sites to remove their feeds anytime soon as the traffic burst will be too great to even consider removing the auto submissions (I can’t blame them).

Here’s an example of the auto-submissions on both Twitter and Facebook using the blog Mashable (a default user on both services):

One of the gripes top digger Muhammed Saleem was concerned about is the ability to get “non-mainstream” news any visibility on the new Digg. If we take a look at the popular top news technology section, here’s the breakdown of the 15 top stories by publisher (I left out the in-stream ad):

• Wired – 3
• Mashable – 3
• Ars Technica – 3
• Engadget – 3
• Twit – 2
• Nextweb – 1

For reference, all of these sites are default/suggested publishers. And all of these publishers are auto-publishing all stories to Digg. As these publishers add more followers from their Digg freebies, the percentage of their stories that hit the homepage will go up while any other publishers and/or users will be drowned out. I wonder if CEO Kevin Rose considered this issue. Maybe Muhammed is right…

Diggs vs. Retweets

Digg allows you to vote for stories you like — Twitter lets you retweet stories you like. If a story gets enough votes on Digg, it moves to the homepage. If a story gets enough retweets it moves to a “Top Tweet” and could become a trending topic.

Ads

Digg runs banner ads and instream ads. Twitter runs sponsored topics and third-party services put ads in streams.

Conclusion

I can’t blame Digg for many of the changes they’ve made in this new version of the service. It has a much more “mainstream” feel to it and while a lot of heavy users will be mad, as long as Digg gets traffic inbound from Google (though Andy says they need to fix the SEO) and can send traffic to publishers, Digg should come out ahead. I’m not sure a less group of less radical changes would have potentially helped Digg as much as the current set of changes can.

So, is the new Digg really just Twitter plus comments? If I already grab the feeds of the default users on Digg in my Twitter stream, why would I need to visit Digg at all? What am I missing here? I sure hope I am missing something in my analysis as I used to spend a good deal of time on the site and would be open to spending time there again.

Find more stories about: Digg, social media, Social Networking, Social News, Twitter

Yesterday the big news wasn’t that Lindsay Lohan is out of rehab. The real news was that the new version of the social news site Digg launched to the public. Alex from Next Web has an overview of the new Digg. While I don’t use Digg much anymore, it was interesting to see how much of Digg seems to be just like Twitter. From using the “following/followers” terminology to the addition of a default list (aka Suggested User List), it seems like Digg wants to be the “Twitter for News”.

Maybe I never noticed it but it appears that you can now submit a RSS feed and every story you post will automatically be posted to Digg. Many of the accounts I looked at yesterday are setup with this auto-post function.

If we can get serious for a minute, the Suggested User List is what made twitter hit the big time – period. And Digg wants to follow the same pattern hoping the default list will help them regain a strong position in the new technology market. Not surprisingly, Mashable has about 30 feeds on the default technology list and “friends” also take up a lot of the tech list similar to how the Twitter list was/is crafted while I don’t see any of the power diggers (these are the users who spend many hours a day finding stories to post and share on Digg) like Muhammad Saleem on the list.  Lastly, if you look closely, most of the “friends” are just scraped RSS feeds.

Most blog posts I read regarding the new Digg launch ended with a question about whether this new version will help Digg regain the buzz and attention they had several years ago.

Last night I listened to the Drill Down podcast which brings together several of the top power Digg users to discuss popular tech stories from the previous week.

The Drill Down podcast includes several Digg users who get the most stories to the frontpage – Mr. Babyman, Muhammad Saleem and JD Rucker. It’s interesting to hear the group get so fired up about the new Digg. From what I can tell, it looks like the Digg team didn’t include these users in the feedback process while building the new version.

Muhammad talks candidly in the video about his take on the new Digg site. If you use Digg or plan to use Digg, you should listen to Muhammad’s comments. Muhammad uses the word “bullshit” a lot in his commentary.

And the Digg team should also listen to Muhammad’s comments as many are very good suggestions for improvement – for example, he notes that pagination is gone and now works like Twitter. So if you click “load more stories” and then click refresh, you lose your place on the page.

One comment I had immediately which the power diggers also noted is that the timestamp for stories has been removed. My take is that they removed the time stamp so that stories can hit the frontpage anytime – this will help Digg push the publishers they need to without worry about the supposed former 24-hour timeframe.

A lot of the conversation centers around mainstream media vs. indies. Clearly the Suggested User List pushes mainstream media and a few Digg friends. The podcast hosts discuss whether small and/or medium publishers will ever see success with the new Digg.

The group did agree that the new Digg site loads faster. I would add that the site has a crisp look and seems very responsive.

Mr. Babyman suggests that if you are a publisher you don’t use the RSS scraper function and instead be selective about what you publish to Digg. There is no way that will happen – publishers won’t care about what a user sees – only about the potential of a traffic burst from Digg.

Here’s part one of the Drill Down podcast from last night – jump to 42:30 for the beginning of the new Digg discussion. And check out part II for the balance of the discussion.

For more about Digg, check out my look from April regarding the two things Digg has left.

Find more stories about: Digg, Industry News

It’s been a really, really long time since we took a look at Digg. For those of you that are new to CN, Digg was the first site I reviewed when I started CenterNetworks. I remember attending the Future of Web Apps in San Francisco in late 2006 and hearing Digg founder Kevin Rose speak at the conference. So many attendees I spoke with were there to hear specifically to hear Rose speak — you can read my notes from his presentation.

This week the big news in the valley wasn’t the new iPhone OS, but rather the removal of Digg CEO Jay Adelson and the announcement that Kevin Rose has taken over as CEO of Digg. I think this is actually a smart move for Digg — below I share the reasons why.

Digg has been losing mindshare over the last year as sites like Twitter and Facebook take over as the sharing leaders. Bloggers I spoke with prefer pushing FB/Twitter because they will see at least some traffic whereas Digg is an all or nothing game. And if you aren’t a top digger or a digg-friendly site, your chances of hitting the home page are nearly zero. Lastly, many of the larger blogs were given the free Twitter follower gift which provides for massive traffic and sharing. There’s another big benefit of pushing Twitter over Digg – readers immediately visit your site/blog and potentially interact at the source rather than the chance of losing the reader at the middleman site.

There are basically two things that Digg has left – Google search and Kevin Rose.

In early 2007 I asked the following question, “why is Digg listed in Google search results?” If you haven’t read the article, you should as the argument still stands today and frankly is even worse today with the number of aggregators that have hit the market since 2007. It’s amazing how strong Digg is for search results. Many times I see the Digg result outranking the actual source article. As Digg looks to forge a new road forward, their Google rankings should form a strong foundation from which to build upon.

The other thing Digg has left is the new CEO Kevin Rose. Kevin is Digg. Kevin has grown a lot since the early days of Digg and still has a very loyal following. Sure the Digg community has attacked Kevin several times (remember the DVD key incident?), but overall they will line up for him at any point in time. Heck, in just one day everyone is ga-ga for Rose after he announced that they will remove the Diggcrapbar in the very near future.

Digg appears to be heading in the right direction with the Diggbar removal and their earlier announcement about new blog badges that let people Digg content without leaving the publisher’s site. Will we see websites and blogs re-add the Digg badge to their badge lineup?

For Digg to succeed in 2010 and beyond, they need to figure out how to embrace and satisfy multiple groups: their advertisers, their users and their content sources (blogs, news outlets, etc). Digg also needs to figure out how to get the next generation of potential diggers to get involved — this is something I’ve said will be tough. Many of the digg userbase have moved on and some have even leveraged their ability to get stories to the frontpage into real jobs and book deals.

 With Rose in place as CEO, I do believe we will see a “Foursquare” type media blitz over the next 6-9 months. Even though I once thought Digg would sell to the Guardian, I imagine we will see a sale to a media company like Comcast in 2011, for right around the $40 million they have raised to-date.

Find more stories about: Digg, Kevin Rose, social media

Earlier today, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom proclaimed that today is “Digg Day”. Apparently what this means is that it is now a law that each resident of San Francisco digg at least one story today. Failure to do so will result in loss of 20 Twitter followers.

Our team of investigative journalists in the bay area have been running around town investigating this story and found the following results of the investigation. Beginning on January 1, 2010, San Francisco will no longer use the Gregorian calendar.  That’s the one that we learn as little kids the rhyme, ”30 days has november, april, june and september”. Going forward San Francisco will use the “Startups Calendar”. This might sound new to some of you and I can confirm after speaking with the people at Gregorian that it is indeed new. They are worried that there might be issues with the new calendar but I explained that San Francisco is always ahead of the curve and is always innovating!

Some of the dates in 2010 have already been booked. For example, our investigation revealed that Facebook has January 10th, Google is bidding on two dates using Google CalendarWords and Twitter has the month of August.  Twitter got the full month after adding the Mayor to the suggested user list.

After speaking with the city “calendaring task force for calendars”, we have learned that from December 15-21, there will be an open nomination process for other dates.

The nomination process is simple. Startup founders may nominate their startup for a day. The startup must have less than $72.13 billion in revenue (this is per the nomination rules for that startup awards thing), at least 300 Twitter followers and 152.1 Facebook Friends. We also learned that if the startup is using MySpace, they are disqualified. Now you might  be wondering what happens if say Seesmic and Kyte pick the same day. That’s simple – article 12, paragraph 1 states that the startup with the most Twitter followers receive the date.

If you would like to nominate your startup or find out more about the rules, go here for complete details.

Find more stories about: Digg, San Francisco, startups

A new NY-based startup named NYC.is is hoping to create, “a new kind of front page”. The idea is simple…users submit NYC-related stories and then other users vote on each story. The best ones appear on the frontpage of NYC.is.  The site was developed by a Columbia grad student.

What I’ve noticed after living here is that nearly every community in the five boroughs has multiple websites discussing the local scene from food to transit to parties. NYC.is could be a good place to aggregate all of that information together and help local news and events get more visibility.

As with any voting site, I must note that the voting mechanism is Digg-like. Not the Digg of late, but the earlier Digg.

NYC.is accepts links via a web submission form but should also look at accepting links via facebook and twitter. They are currently indexing over 100 sites including The Feedbag, Joey in Astoria and Sheepshead Bites.

NYC.is appears to be using Drupal as their CMS platform. While there are currently no ads on the site, they are working with Technorati Media for ad sales and management.

Find more stories about: Digg, nextNY, NYC, startups

Swiss-based Sobees has announced updates to their two client applications: bDule and Sobees. Founder Francois Bochatay explains the difference between the two application by noting that bDule is their starter kit providing a Windows-based client combining Twitter and Facebook support. Sobees is a multi-window application that combines many “bDules” together.

Most of the updates in today’s 0.9.6.5 release are usability and performance enhancements. They have also rewritten the Flickr search. The new functionality is the addition of Digg and the Digg search along with the ability to submit items from others windows to Digg. They have also added new themed content windows for the MLB, soccer, tennis and the NFL.

The Sobees tools compete in the same space as Tweetdeck and the new Seesmic. Currently the Sobees tools are only available for Windows. The company is working on a cross-platform version which they expect to release this summer.

Find more stories about: Digg, Facebook, Seesmic, Sobees, Twitter

One of the first posts here on CN was a recap of a presentation at the Future of Web Apps conference with Kevin Rose. In that presentation (and many since), Kevin noted that the site was built with, “$2,000 to start, using a developer on elance for $10/hr.”

Found via Andrew Badera, below is an interview with Andrew Warner of Mixergy and Owen Byrne. Owen was the technical builder of the first version of Digg. In the interview, Owen speaks about what really took place as Digg was built. Andrew talks about the “celebrity” status that Kevin Rose has received for creating Digg. Some notes:

• Apparently Kevin was nervous that he might be losing his job and needed to find something else to move to
• The supposed $10/hr on Elance is not correct Owen says – it was more and he also received equity in the company
• Digg mainly came about because Kevin wanted to get to the frontpage of Slashdot and couldn’t
• Kevin had a lot of friends who blogged about Digg and the notes on the Screensavers show helped build massive inbound links
• Owen says luck and timing played a big part of the Digg success
• Interesting line from Owen regarding luck… “luck is just probability and the more times you try, the higher your probability”
• Apparently Paris Hilton losing her cell phone was a huge help with Digg growth in the early days
• Interesting discussion from Owen’s perspective about the human side of Digg’s growth

Check out the full video interview below and the associated notes on Mixergy. Andrew pushes Owen to give tips about entrepreneurship. You can just listen to this video while you are working – it’s a must listen/watch.

Find more stories about: Digg, Interviews

Earlier today Digg announced the launch of their new "DiggBar". Basically the new version of a toolbar from the early 90s, the idea is to provide an easy way to see if someone has submitted the story to Digg along with related stats and stories from other publishers via Digg. Lots of other tech journalists covered the story including Michael Arrington, Frederic Lardinois and MG Siegler. I hadn’t planned on covering this story but after reviewing the code behind the toolbar, there are some very important points that these journalists seem to have missed that I thought were worth sharing.

Tracking

From checking the code, Digg is running (at least) two sets of analytics within the toolbar. One appears to come from Microsoft and the other comes from Quantcast. The Quantcast code is identical to the main site – just how will that play into Digg’s monthly numbers on Quantcast? It sure looks like each DiggBar load will also increment the counter for Quantcast 1-for-1. Should they be credited on a toolbar load as if it was a full page load? Of course not – I have an email into Quantcast to verify how these toolbars will be counted. Toolbar and widget counts and analytics are the most difficult today because of the way they load and are handled – this was a part of my discussion with ShareThis last week.

Ad Serving

As MG noted, there are ads inside of the toolbar… how do those ads load? While they only "appear" when a tab is selected, are they actually loaded upon initial DiggBar load? I will need to confirm but it does appear that the ads are all loaded into the page when the DiggBar is loaded. It’s a pretty damn interesting question – not just for Digg but for any site that hides ads on pageloads.

Double Pageviews

Since Digg has changed their entire site to use this new DiggBar, sites that hit the Digg frontpage may benefit from massive double pageviews. Why? For users who click the big X to eliminate the toolbar, Digg is then forced to reload the exact same webpage again. Should advertisers be paying for this double pageview? If I was an advertiser on x or y site, this would certainly be something for me to consider. Of course the favorite Digg sites will love the bonus pageviews. I think there were some actions around this double pageview ad behavior in the mid-90s.

Also, Digg gets a double pageview when stories are clicked from Digg.com. You view a story on Digg and click a link (say Ars Technica). Digg loads up the bar with full goodness and grabs a second pageview from the bar load. Interesting…

Page Load Times

The DiggBar is nearly 100k in size – what does that do to page load times, especially when browsing from a mobile?

I will leave the topic of URL stealers (similar to conversation stealers) for another post as the issue is wider than just the DiggBar.

I would be careful to put DiggBar in the same category as other URL shorteners like MooURL, TinyURL or even Bitly. This is much more of a Digg play than an actual URL shortener.

Find more stories about: analytics, Digg, Quick News, reporting

Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider has an investigative post today where he analyzed the advertising that is running on Digg. At the end of his investigation, he noted that Digg is clearly running targeted ads now because he viewed ads that matched three of Digg’s categories. He concluded the investigation by calling the change a, "christmas miracle".

Clickety Clack disagreed with the Carlson investigation, noting that the ads were just run of network ads. I decided to take a look into whether the ads were now, in fact, being targeted. Assuming they are, it would certainly be a good step for Digg because frankly I wonder sometimes who is in charge of their business plan. In our test back in March, 52% of Digg’ers blocked ads when visiting CN through a link on the Digg frontpage. Ads alone will never be enough to keep Digg afloat.

What did I find? To test, I used three computers, two logged into Digg, one anonymous on three different Internet connections. Below are a few of the screenshots I grabbed from the pages that Carlson notes are now targeted. As you can see, the ads in my testing are not targeted. Looking at the source code, it also doesn’t appear that there is anything but the typical run-of-network ads running on Digg. At this point, without any confirmation from Digg, I can only infer that Carlson was just lucky in his page load timing in viewing targeted ads on category pages.

Find more stories about: advertising, Digg, online advertising, Quick News, Silicon Alley Insider

A year ago I reviewed the first episode of NBC tech drama Chuck. Overall the writers have done an excellent job in bringing in geek technology without making it appear fake. From dropping a wikipedia here and a router there, it’s a fun little show.

However in this week’s episode, a comment was made by Chuck’s sidekick Morgan that clearly had me wondering. I’ve embedded the clip below (30 seconds). Morgan (and clearly NBC as the creator of the show) didn’t get the memo from Diggnation founder Kevin Rose. You see Diggnation is sponsored by the Zune, the Microsoft music player. If Kevin and Revision3 are taking the $$ from Microsoft for the Zune, you know that it is a damn fine quality product and should not be joked with. Let’s hope that next week Chuck will check the current lineup of sponsors for Diggnation and properly handle them if the need arises inside of the episode.

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Social news site Digg has announced a new round of funding today to the tune of $28.7 million. This brings their total funding to $40 million. Digg CEO Jay Adelson notes that the funding will be used to expand the Digg team and move the larger team to a new office in San Francisco. Adelson also notes that currently they are at 30 million unique visitors monthly and that half of those users are non-U.S. Digg will put resources against meeting local user needs in other countries. There will also be investment into architecture – something I think Digg does a great job with.

The funding comes from existing venture backers Greylock Partners, Silicon Valley Bank and the Omidyar Network and was led by new investor Highland Capital Partners. It certainly seems like a lot of money - perhaps they are hunkering down for the potentially bad financial times.

Digg has seen many rumors floating around with regards to acquisitions over the past 18 months including Google and Microsoft.

Our inside source tells us that part of the funding will be to dedicate an employee to pushing Ars Technica stories to the frontpage. 

Brad Stone at the NY Times additionally notes, "Digg will also use the cash to develop analytic tools for its publishing partners who use Digg buttons on their sites (such as the New York Times), so that those publishers can see what kinds of stories resonate with Digg users. The company will also move to larger headquarters in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco."

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