Digg Cuts 10% Of Staff

Digg has cut around twelve people from its staff, we’re hearing. The company’s about page lists 72 employees, but it’s possible that they have more than that overall. When contacted about the news Digg told us they’d be publishing a blog post shortly — we’ll update with more information once that is up. Update: The post, which contains an Email that was sent to Digg employees, just went live. Here’s what CEO Kevin Rose had to say:

Hey everyone,

This morning we faced the difficult task of reducing our team by about 10%. This was an emotional and rough morning for everyone involved. Laying off dedicated and hard working individuals is extremely difficult, but we tried our best to treat everyone with the utmost respect and support. I hope all of you will join me in the effort to assist all of those affected, be it as a reference or a referring source and most importantly, as a friend.

This is one of the hardest decisions we’ve had to make recently but we strongly believe that it is the right decision for the long-term 
health of the company. In order to achieve our goals, we are putting more emphasis on the engineering and development efforts. In fact, we are still hiring for these teams as they are critical in getting us to where we need to be for the future, for our impending upcoming redesign and much beyond. The only way for us to truly succeed is to adapt and adjust as necessary.

I’m sure there will be many follow-
up questions to this email. So, we’ll be holding an all hands today at 3pm where you can ask questions and share your comments.

Thanks,

Kevin

The news comes one month after Digg founder Kevin Rose became the company’s CEO, taking the role from Jay Adelson.

Rose has been making quite a few changes since taking the helm of the company, making moves to kill off products like the Diggbar. He’s also been making changes to the long-delayed Digg revamp, we’ve heard.

Crunchbase

• DIGG

Company: Digg

Website: digg.com

Launch Date: October 11, 2004

Funding: $45M

Digg is a user driven social content website. Everything on Digg is user-submitted. After you submit content, other people read your submission and “Digg” what they like best. If your story receives enough Diggs, it’s promoted to the front page for other visitors to see. Kevin Rose came up with the idea for Digg in the fall of 2004. He found programmer Owen Byrne through eLance and paid him $10/hour to develop the idea. In addition, Rose paid $99...

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