the j. botter weblog

Man, Digg is hurting right now.

As of 12:05am Eastern Time, when I’m writing this post, Digg’s front page is completely taken over with spam submissions about the HD-DVD hex code that allows users to play pirated HD-DVD content. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Even Chris Pirillo is getting in on the act, something I haven’t seen from him for as long as I’ve been reading his stuff.

The uproar stems from the Digg brass pruning stories related to the hex code. They’ve begun to delete both submissions AND the accounts of those who are submitting, which is something they’ve never resorted to before today, at least not in mass quantities like this.

Digg CEO Jay Adelson posted an entry about the situation today, but it’s done nothing to calm down the Digg masses. In fact, it might have only served to infuriate them more — which has resulted in Digg begin completely overwhelmed with spam. In fact, all of the top stories on the main page are related to the hex code.

I just have two points to make:

• Why are people getting so offended about this? Yes, everyone steals music, and there’s a lot of people who do the same thing with movies. But 99% of internet users don’t brag about it in public, especially on a place with the amount of traffic Digg pulls in.
• I understand that you are angry about Digg deleting your submisisons and your accounts, but you probably shouldn’t have been stupid enough to do it in the first place. Muhammad points out that Digg had every right to pull the story, and they were right in doing so. I agree. Digg is democratic in nature, but it’s pretty obvious that someone needs to police the teenagers on Digg, because today is a perfect example of what happens when you allow them any sort of freedom.

Update: Ryan Block has written what I consider to be the most informative article on the situation this far, which doesn’t surprise me in the least given how great Ryan is on Engadget.

Jason, I agree that paying your top social bookmarkers is a good thing to do, but you’ve gotta stop taking potshots at Kevin Rose and Digg over this thing. You’re not the underdog here, man, so there’s no need to take little swipes at Kevin and the Digg team. All you’re doing is creating a bad taste in the mouth of many supporters, of which I am one.

Just concentrate on creating the best product you can and stop the one-sided verbal war. Kevin stopped long ago, probably because he realized it’s pointless. You’re not going to add thousands of users by taking potshots at the competition, but you WILL earn thousands of new users by developing and deploying exciting new stuff that Digg doesn’t have. Concentrate on being creative and pushing the bleeding edge and don’t worry about what Digg is or isn’t doing anymore.

BusinessWeek has a cover story on Digg rockstar/founder Kevin Rose this week. I say rockstar because Kevin truly is one, despite not being a musician (I think). He’s created something people love, hundreds attend his parties, women fawn over him, and he’s got money.

The article is good, though. I’m always interested to read how web dudes come up with the stuff they create. It’s an inspiration to those of us who are interested in creation.

One interesting quote:

“We have a clear path toward becoming a profitable company, and we’re fully funded. We don’t have to worry about it now, as long as we keep hitting our numbers.”

Isn’t Digg already profitable? They haven’t taken much in the way of funding (at least compared to other dot-coms), and they’re making a killing off the Federated Media advertisements, so aren’t they making money already?

I’m wondering what Digg will sell for, if indeed it eventually sells. Something tells me that if someone offers Kevin Rose 100 million dollars for a site he bootstrapped, he’ll take it. If he doesn’t, he’s more of a punk rocker than I thought he was.

As a followup to my previous post about Digg being compared to the New York Times, LeAnn Prescott from Hitwise has released a comparative study on the traffic of both sites. The data backs up what I pointed out in my post: though Digg may have the market cornered on early adopters, the New York Times still far outweighs Digg in terms of how many people are reading it.

The interesting thing to me was the complete and total difference in the audience that both sites draw.

Digg attracts a different demographic audience than the NY Times. For the four weeks ending 7/1/06, 26% of Digg’s users were in the 18-24 age bracket, while only 9.5% of NY Times users were in that age group. NY Times skews much older, with 34% of its users in the 55+ age group. Only 10% of Digg’s users were over 55 in that time period.

I don’t think Kevin and Jay actually WANT Digg to be the New York Times.  They’ve both stated in the past that they’re huge fans of the paper, and they also subscribe to my belief that nothing will ever beat sitting back in an easy chair and reading a real newspaper. I get most of my news from the internet, but I’ll always love sitting back and reading the deadtree newspapers.

Everybody’s been weighing in with opinions on the Digg vs. New York Times thing. Michael Arrington was the first, and it’s started making the rounds.  It’s a valid opinion.  Before the launch of Digg 3.0, I visited Digg, at most, once a day.  Since the 3.0 launch the inclusion of other topics besides technology, I’d say I probably visit it somewhere around 12-15 times a day.  I’m digging topics, I’m leaving comments, I’m checking out what my friends are doing; the overall result is a much more comprehensive and immersive site where I know I’m going to be able to find out the latest cool stories in music, movies and more.

Does Digg outweigh the New York Times? Not entirely.  For regular news, Digg still can’t keep pace with places like CNN.com or even Newsvine, because the Digg community doesn’t stay as active in posting world news as they do in the other containers.  I’m not sure that, at least for a lot of people, anything will ever take the place of sitting back in a chair in the evening and reading the newspaper. I get all my news from the web, because I don’t watch television and I don’t read the paper, but that’s me. I’m an early adopter. I stay on the bleeding edge of technology, so it’s easier for me to get my news via the web.

Digg is great.  It’s one of my top three favorite sites out there. But it’s not the New York Times, and it doesn’t matter if Digg KILLS NYT in internet pageviews; if you mixed in the daily readers of the NYT, those who have subscribed for years, the story would look a lot different.

We are focused on creating new features and expanding digg into new areas beyond tech.

Nobody should be surprised that Kevin is denying the Yahoo story. I can’t remember the last time someone came out and said “hey, we’re in talks with Yahoo and they’re offering us such and such amount of money plus really cool desks with a view of the Yahoogarden. And free wi-fi.” I can’t remember any instance like that because it NEVER HAPPENS.

It’s been a fun two days.

Don’t EVER let anyone tell you that the Digg Effect isn’t real, because man, it is.

Three days ago, my blog recieved 40 pageviews. I hadn’t been advertising it or anything; a select group of friends read it and sometimes linked to me. It’s more about my writing itch than popularity, as I believe it should be for everyone involved in blogging. Otherwise, you end up writing for traffic, and that never works out.

After the Yahoo/Digg story, my pageviews jumped. And I don’t mean a little jump, like “hey, that’s cool” kinda jump. I’m talking “where in the blue hell are all these people coming from” kind of jump. In one day, my Yahoo/Digg post recieved over 6,800 visitors. Some of them were from blogs linking in, but 99% came directly from Digg.

Today, the traffic is poised to double that, and it’s not because of Digg. The Digg story was demoted from the front page; I’m still recieving traffic from other people linking to the Digg story, but most of my visitors today have come from other blogs that have picked up the story and linked back. The two sites sending the most traffic my way today have been Memeorandum (where it’s the top story at the moment) and TechCrunch, where Mike linked to the post. There’s also a lot coming from WordPress.com Dashboards due to this site being ranked in the top three blogs on WordPress.com and being the fastest-growing WordPress.com blog, as well.

The moral of the story? Don’t ever doubt the effect Digg can have on your blog. I shudder to think how much that Digg link would have cost me if I were paying for bandwidth. Thanks, WordPress!

Kevin Burton says he’s heard from two sources close to Yahoo that the company is going to buy Digg for roughly $30M, with an announcement to come early next week.

I’d heard the same thing from my source, but didn’t want to throw any more fuel on the fire by speculating more than I did by posting the news in the first place. The Digg guys are absolutely right in accepting this offer, because as I said previously, Digg is never going to be worth more than they are right now. The $30M offer means they are getting upwards of $200 per registered users, which is only going to go down over time as more people sign up and companies like NewsVine invade the space that Digg created.

Why doesn’t Yahoo just create a Digg? Surely it would be a lot cheaper than $30M, right? The thing is, Yahoo is obviously trying to become known as the next big one-stop social networking site; it’s why they’ve made the purchases they’ve made. They’ve got the market cornered on social photosharing with Flickr, they’ve got Delicious, and now they’re supposedly going to have Digg under the umbrella. For Yahoo, it’s not about building apps that copy popular technology that’s out there; they could do that in a heartbeat. It’s about getting the installed userbases and also, more importantly, about credibility. Yahoo’s credibility would go down the drain if they simply copied popular apps; instead, they’re buying them, which in turn nets them a little more street cred every time they do it. For Yahoo, making these purchases is a tiny price to pay for the recognition they get for not simply building their own, but recognizing that others have already done it better and bringing them under the Yahoo name instead of just copying the software.

From Om Malik:

I am wondering why would Yahoo do this deal so soon after Del.icio.us acquisition? If there is any truth, and I mean a really big “if,” then why didn’t they buy Digg.com in the first place?

They’re two very different animals. Digg is about social news, where the articles that make it to the front page for everyone to read are only there because lots of people thought they were good enough for the rest of the world to read. That’s how it’s SUPPOSED to be, at least. Del.icio.us is link-sharing, and the two of them combined will make for a nearly unstoppable powerhouse once Yahoo gets the infrastructure going.

Update: Several people have pointed out that TagWorld is around 500,000 thousand users strong right now.  While still being dwarfed by the astronomical MySpace numbers, 500,000 users is nothing to sneeze at.  After all, Digg reportedly is running just shy of 200,000 users, and Yahoo’s willing to part with significant money to get them in the fold, so TagWorld might be worth a bit more, especially if you’re looking at the purchase price being set because of the amount of users.

Digg’s own Kevin Rose posted a response to the Yahoo aquisition rumors:

“Rumors… we are focused on features, not selling the company.”

First off, I never said Digg was accepting the Yahoo offer.  I merely stated that Yahoo has an offer on the table to buy the company.  Do I think it’ll happen?  Perhaps.  Kevin says they’re focused on features, which is all fine and good, but at some point, they are going to sell the company, and Yahoo, as it stands right now, is the foremost suitor.

And the price stated is probably just about right.  Users in the Digg thread leading to this page said that Yahoo bought Delicious for $500 million, which is totally way off base.  It’s a lot more likely that Yahoo probably paid somewhere in the range of $50 million, which would put the Digg numbers slightly lower, right around the same price that I stated in my previous post.

As I stated on the previous post as well, this is not confirmed.  I’m glad everyone is reading and commenting, but take it with a grain of salt.

For all this talk of Yahoo throwing in the towel and conceding the search market to Google, there sure is lots of talk going on that, if proven correct, could see Yahoo jump right back in the game. They’ve already got Flickr, Upcoming and Delicious, and from what I hear, one final piece of the puzzle could be added sooner rather than later, as little birdies have informed me that Yahoo has an offer on the table to buy Digg for somewhere in the range of $35 million dollars.

I don’t know how true it is, but the same guy DID tell me that Yahoo was buying Delicious, and sure enough, they made an announcement two days later.

If I’m Kevin Rose, I’d be selling, because they are never going to get the kind of market price that’s being offered to them right now.

Update: I try to answer some of the questions surrounding the Digg purchase and speculate further on why they’re seeking Digg in the first place at another post. I’ve also got some speculation about the future of TagWorld, one of my favorite new social networking apps.