With 17 million monthly uniques at its disposal, news aggregator Digg, which is attempting to overcome the user exodus caused by its unpopular Version 4 redesign in late August 2010, needs to find a way to keep its usership engaged, and to grow.
It’s solution? The Topic Newsrooms beta, which separates news into top categories like Technology, Entertainment, World News and even topics as granular as Lady Gaga or Apple attempting to rebuild user communities around specific news. “There are a lot of signals out there,” Digg CEO Matt Williams, who describes what happened with Digg Version 4 as a “tragedy,” tells me, “It’s difficult to sort out what’s meaningful on a given topic versus what’s popular.” → Read More
Digg has raised a new round of financing, we’ve confirmed. It’s an inside round, meaning one or more existing investors put in the money.
We’ve heard the amount raised was single digit millions, probably around $5 million. CEO Matt Williams has confirmed the financing to us, but won’t give an exact number on the amount raised. → Read More
The Financial Times yesterday reported on the upcoming IPO of Chinese social network Renren.com:
The strong interest [in Renren's IPO] stems from the fact that there is no major social media or social networking company open to public investment. With a Facebook IPO at least a year off, many investors are keen for a slice of “the Facebook of China”.
The offering is set to price on Tuesday in the US and begin trading on Wednesday. Highlighting the success of the pitch to market Renren as a Facebook proxy, the price range was raised on Friday from the initial $9-$11 to $12-$14. That could increase the deal size to as much as $743m, from the $584m planned originally.
The link in the excerpt above is from another Financial Times story that questions Renren’s valuation and user numbers, and is one of many signs that investors should take a cool and calm look at the company. But before looking at the doubts, let’s look at why the company is worth the excitement: → Read More
Well by Silicon Valley standards, that certainly wasn’t a long “stealth” period. Just weeks after he quit Digg, Kevin Rose is announcing details of his new startup. Knowing Rose, I can tell why he’s so excited to get started. He’s constructed a company that plays perfectly to his strengths in the early days– but will test his weaknesses long term.
It’s called Milk, and it’s going to be a development lab in San Francisco’s hipster Mission District for mobile Web ideas. Along the Silicon Valley grapevine people have been calling it an “incubator,” but that term usually implies an organization that accepts entries from would-be entrepreneurs, funds them and helps groom them for the real world. That’s not Milk’s playbook at all. → Read More
I spoke with Digg CEO Matt Williams today about the departure of founder Kevin Rose to work on a new startup, and where Digg goes from here.
Williams is extremely bullish on Digg. Traffic stabilized in January, he says, at about 20 million unique monthly visitors. The company has just 35 employees, he says, after 40% layoffs late last year. With the decreased burn rate the company is approaching cash flow positive, he says, and should get there this year. This is clearly a big priority for Williams, who is about to celebrate six months with the company.
But he also has big product plans for Digg, he says. “A year from now Digg will look very different. It will have a fantastic zeitgeist of the news product but it will also be many other things to news readers,” he told me. → Read More
Startups in Silicon Valley are like old generals. They don’t die anymore, buoyed on life-rafts of lingering venture capital and modest revenues. They just fade away, eventually purchased for assets that are a shadow of their former promise. It’s pretty clear that Digg is on that path.
The company isn’t dead, but it’s been fading away for a while, and its soul is all but gone. The company can spin it however it wants– the final nail in the coffin is news that founder Kevin Rose– long Digg’s greatest asset– is leaving. → Read More
Wow, when I wrote last night that Kevin Rose doesn’t really use Digg anymore, I had no idea how perfect the timing was. It turns out Rose really has tuned out. Because, say multiple sources, he’s already resigned from the company and is closing a $1+ million financing round for a new startup he’s founded.
Rose first launched Digg in December 2004. The service was an instant hit, and for a long while just all the big players thought about acquiring the company. Things never got so close as they did in mid-2008, when Google took Digg all the way to the altar before walking away at the last minute. Digg would have been sold for some $200 million. Every employee knew about the deal because Google had interviewed them all individually. Credit to then-CEO Jay Adelson for getting everyone back on track after the deal fell apart.
But those were the glory days for Digg. The site faded as newer services like Twitter and Facebook became ubiquitous. Rose and Adelson had a falling out, Rose stopped coming by the office much for months, and one of them had to go. It was Adelson. Rose took over as CEO until they hired Matt Williams last Fall. → Read More
How bad are things at the once-mighty Digg these days? Not so good. It’s been months since Digg relaunched in August in a quest for relevance. They had 18 million unique worldwide visitors that month according to Comscore. That dropped to just under 12 million in January, a 33% drop in just five months.
Everything official coming out of Digg says things are great and that a the company will find a way to success. But everyone knows how unlikely that is. Even, it seems, founder Kevin Rose.
He’s barely even using the service anymore. There was one 22 day period in December that he didn’t submit, comment on or even “digg” a single story. → Read More
As we wrote in late November, Digg’s longtime VP of Engineering John Quinn joined flash sales giant Gilt Groupe. Today, Digg is announcing his replacement—Ben Folk-Williams.
Folk-Williams was previously VP of Engineering at search and listings company Vast.com, and prior to that, led engineering at analytics startup Coremetrics, which was acquired by IBM last June. → Read More
Floodgate’s Mike Maples came in the studio yesterday to pre-tape an episode of Ask a VC, and while we had him here we picked his brain about the state of the venture industry. We started by talking about why his firm, Floodgate, is out of step with the broader Super Angel movement. Not only does Maples not believe you can make money through a spray-and-pray-and-flip approach, he doesn’t want to disrupt the existing venture capital ecosystem. He wants to be a part of it.
We also talk about whether it has gotten too easy to start a company these days. Unlike much of the Valley, Maples still considers success to be a $1 billion outcome, and no matter how many companies get started, statistically only about 15 of them wind up being worth $500 million. There is a downside to those thousands that don’t– it wastes the time of talented would be executives, CTOs or even entrepreneurs who are working on a bad idea. While many VCs say they’ll back any great entrepreneur no matter the idea, Maples says a big reason he turns down deals is because he loves the entrepreneur but thinks the idea “isn’t worthy” of him or her. → Read More
What’s the Next Big Thing after social networking?
This has been a favorite topic of much speculation among tech enthusiasts for many years. I think we are already witnessing a paradigm shift – a move away from simple social sharing towards personalized, relevant content.
The key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the Social Graph. While Facebook, Twitter, and Google are already working on delivering relevant content, a slew of startups are focusing exclusively on it. → Read More
In a step back towards the old Digg, Digg Product manager Mike Cieri just sent out an email to partner publishers stating the intent to remove the RSS submitted stories feature. For those of you that remember, the RSS submission feature was how stories from the Reddit publisher account on Digg were sent to the Digg front page in an act of rebellion against the V4 redesign of the site last August.
The painful V4 redesign led to a user revolt and a drastic drop in traffic, with a corresponding increase in traffic over at competitor Reddit. → Read More
Editor’s note: Henry “Hank” Nothhaft, Jr. is the co-founder and CMO of Trapit, a virtual personal assistant for Web content still in private beta that was incubated out of SRI and the CALO project (as was Siri, the conversational search engine bought by Apple).
One of the most interesting concepts to emerge in media and tech lately is that of “serendipity”—showing people what they want even if they didn’t ask for it.
Despite its seemingly ubiquitous invocation, however, the concept of serendipity remains ill-defined and put forth as some vague panacea for a slew of emerging innovations hoping to attract new users in droves. What is needed is a closer look at what we actually mean when we talk about serendipity. → Read More
Jay Adelson, the CEO of Digg until April 2010, just landed in a new position. He’s taking over as CEO of location services startup SimpleGeo, and will join the company’s board of directors. Founding CEO Matt Galligan will become the company’s Chief Strategy Officer.
SimpleGeo, which has raised nearly $10 million in venture capital, allows companies to add location features to applications. Earlier this year we made light fun of the company for failing to clearly explain exactly what developers get out of their product.
Hopefully Adelson understands the company. And he certainly seems to. In a phone call this morning he said he’s excited to be working with former Digg employees Joe Stump and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, and said he’s looking forward working at a startup that is at the absolute center of things right now. → Read More
In a pivot away from the “voice of the crowd” philosophy central to Digg’s early culture, the social news site has launched a human curated feature called “Breaking News” which spotlights top stories selected by Digg staff. As of today you can find Breaking News in red widgets labeled Breaking News to the right of the Upcoming, My News, and Top News sections on the new Digg. Breaking News stories are also designated by flame icons. → Read More
It’s been a difficult couple of months for Digg. The crowdsourced news site pushed out a major new design at the end of August which met with a lot of criticism and broken axles. There was literally a user revolt and things deteriorated so rapidly that earlier this week the company had to let go more than a third of its employees.
How bad did it get? Here’s one data point from comScore: Digg lost 30 percent of its audience in the month of September alone. Digg’s estimated unique visitors worldwide went from 18.4 million in August to 12.8 million in September. That is a drop of 5.6 million people in a single month. Remember, the new site went live for everyone on August 25, so September was the first full month of the new design. Compared to a year before, Digg’s worldwide audience shrank by 16 million visitors. → Read More
Digg just can’t get a break. On the heels of news that the company had to lay off 37% of its staff and saw the departures of both its CRO and CFO, last night a report surfaced alleging that Digg was gaming its own system, ostensibly to favor certain partners. If true, this would have further undermined user trust in the site’s democratic voting system, and the evidence was convincing that something out of the ordinary was going on. Now Digg has just responded to this accusation with a blog post that boils down to, “Yes, we do have fake accounts voting up stories, but they’re for testing purposes”. Here’s a relevant excerpt:
Before doing that, I’m going to address a story submitted to Digg that called out activity of a number of our internal test accounts. As with many sites, we continuously run tests on the site to expose vulnerabilities in our own security. In this case, we did have a number of our internal test accounts Digging content from the Upcoming section of the site. → Read More
This morning most of us woke up to the disappointing news that social news site Digg, once a promising destination for Silicon Valley talent, was losing 37% of its staff as well experiencing key executive departures.
While the usual armchair Twitter quarterbacks responded to the what the layoffs mean for the ailing site, another more positive trend was also evidenced; People making clear that the kind of top tier engineering talent that worked for Digg was welcome at a spectrum of high profile startups and full fledged companies. → Read More
More bad news for Digg. Earlier today we broke the news that Digg was having a large wave of layoffs that cut 37% its staff, which came alongside the exit of Chief Revenue Officer Chas Edwards. We’ve just confirmed that Digg has also seen another departure from its executive team: Chief Financial Officer John Moffett recently left the company.
Moffett wasn’t a recently appointed executive hire — he’s been with Digg for nearly five years, which means he’s been there for most of the company’s history (it launched in 2004). According to his LinkedIn profile, Moffett has served as Digg’s CFO since 2005, and has led the company’s “financial, legal, and human resource initiatives as part of the executive team.” → Read More
On stage at FailCon today, Jay Adelson went over his storied career from Equinix to Digg. Adelson kept emphasizing the fact that he had no regrets despite Digg having failed to pin down acquisition offers from both Current and Google, while the news broke during the panel that Digg had just laid off 37% of its staff.
I asked Adelson while he was onstage whether he wanted to revaluate his “no regrets” comments with this recently reported information, particularly with regards to selling the company early. → Read More
