The Two Things Digg Has Left

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.