As Growth Flattens, Digg Downsizes

Erick Schonfeld

Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the executive producer of DEMO. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City. Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily... → Learn More

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

On a day when Microsoft announced 5,000 layoffs, the 7 or so people losing their jobs at Digg may seem like a drop in the bucket. But that represents about about 10 percent of Digg’s 75-person workforce, whereas the 5,000 at Microsoft represents 5 percent. We have added Digg to our Layoff Tracker.

This move follows layoffs last October at sister company Revision3, which was also founded by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson. Adelson writes in a blog post that his goal is to become profitable in 2009, and he is hiring a salesforce to sell ads directly, in addition to trying to make Digg’s advertising partnership with Microsoft more fruitful.

The paring back at Digg comes along during a brutal advertising recession, and flattening growth at the site. In the U.S., Digg attracted 6.8 million unique visitors in December, up only 2 percent since its last peak in July (comScore numbers). Worldwide, the site is doing a little better, with 17.7 million unique visitors in December, up 7 percent from July

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