Digg, stylized in lowercase as digg, is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launched in its current form on July 31, 2012, with support for sharing content to other social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
It formerly had been a popular social news website, allowing people to vote web content up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. In 2012, Quantcast estimated Digg's monthly U.S. unique visits at 3.8 million. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of similar sites such as Reddit.
In July 2008, the former company took part in advanced acquisition talks with Google for a reported $200 million price tag, but the deal ultimately fell through. After a controversial 2010 redesign and the departure of co-founders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, in July 2012 Digg was sold in three parts: the Digg brand, website, and technology were sold to Betaworks for an estimated $500,000; 15 staff were transferred to The Washington Post Companys "SocialCode" for a reported $12 million; and a suite of patents was sold to LinkedIn for about $4 million.
In April 2018, Digg was purchased by BuySellAds, an advertising company, for an undisclosed amount.
History
Digg started as an experiment in November 2004 by collaborators Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson. The original design by Dan Ries was free of advertisements. The company added Google AdSense early in the project but switched to MSN adCenter in 2007.
The site's main function was to let users discover, share and recommend web content. Members of the community could submit a webpage for general consideration. Other members could vote that page up ("digg") or down ("bury"). Although voting took place on digg.com, many websites added "digg" buttons to their pages, allowing users to vote as they browsed the web. The end product was a series of wide-ranging, constantly updated lists of popular and trending content from around the Internet, aggregated by a social network.
Additions and improvements were made throughout the website's first years. Digg v2 was released in July 2005, with a new interface by web design company silverorange. New features included a friends list, and the ability to "digg" a story without being redirected to a success page. One year later, as part of Digg v3, the website added specific categories for technology, science, world and business, videos, entertainment, and gaming, as well as a "view all" section that merged all categories. Further interface adjustments were made in August 2007.
By 2008, Digg's homepage was attracting over 236 million visitors annually, according to a Compete.com survey. Digg had grown large enough that it was thought to affect the traffic of submitted web pages. Some pages experienced a sudden increase in traffic shortly after being submitted; some Digg users refer to this as the "Digg effect".
Redesign
CEO Jay Adelson said in 2010 that the site would go through some major changes. In the interview with Wired magazine, Adelson said that "Every single THING has changed" and that "the entire website has been rewritten." The company changed from MySQL to Cassandra, a distributed database system; in a blog post, VP Engineering John Quinn said that the move was "bold". Adelson summed up the new Digg by saying, "We've got a new backend, a new infrastructure layer, a new services layer, new machines—everything."
Adelson stepped down as CEO on April 5, 2010, to explore entrepreneurial opportunities, months before the launch date of Digg v4. He had been the company's CEO since its inception. Kevin Rose, another original founder, stepped in temporarily as CEO and Chairman.
Digg's v4 release on August 25, 2010, was marred by site-wide bugs and glitches. Digg users reacted with hostile verbal opposition. Beyond the release, Digg faced problems due to so-called "power users" who would manipulate the article recommendation features to only support one another's postings, flooding the site with articles only from these users and making it impossible to have genuine content from non-power users appear on the front page. Frustrations with the system led to dwindling web traffic, exacerbated by heavy competition from Facebook, whose like buttons started to appear on websites next to Digg's. High staff turnover included the departure of head of business development Matt Van Horn, shortly after v4's release.
On September 1, 2010, Matt Williams took over as CEO, ending Rose's troubled tenure as interim chief executive.