What Started The Downfall of Digg

This particular article is rather poorly written, but if its title has a ? appended it makes a fun discussion topic.

My take is that Digg's downfall (if it happens :-) was sealed long ago by Kevin Rose's personality. One only has to watch Diggnation with their stupid drinking antics and Beavis and Butthead humor to know that the audience Digg was courting was pretty low brow.

Then, suddenly, Digg tried to extend outside tech news and be a general purpose new site. Big mistake since low brow doesn't mix with Science, World News, etc.

The only positive thing I can say for Digg is that at least the comments there aren't as bad as on YouTube.

Or maybe I'm just bitter because I got banned from Digg and publicly branded a 'spammer' by a Digg employee.

The fact that one is submitting a story to an entire community means that users will resort to submitting stories that are either very sensationalistic or are 'funny', to appeal to the widest audience. And that's where I think Digg's flaw is. They put too much emphasis on 'making the front page', so users then adopt the motivation of submitting the most ridiculous garbage to get on the front page. On Diggnation, frequent front pagers became celebrities, and being a frequent front pager was a status symbol. Unlike here, where we're not concerned about making it in the top 10, but rather that we submit quality stuff. It really is all about the niche.

Its interesting how they come up with $300 million valuation.

This is the second post I've seen where they value each user at $77 Dlls, which is exorbitant based on click through monetization, simply look at a how much Google is really willing to pay for an actual user having Google as their home page and monetizing their searches, which is likely more profitable to them than content.

I'll give you the Firefox/Google Toolbar signup with numbers, via AdSense they pay out from $1 dollar to .10 cents for each user you sign-up for Firefox with the Google Toolbar -- the range depends on the country the user is in, with $1 dollar going to north america and .10 cents to the lower bracket countries, those which I assume have less advertisers.

With this model Google ensures that each time a user opens Firefox and makes a search they will exposed to their ads, even considering a huge premium on the signup, its a long-way from actually paying $1 dollar for every user to $77 dollars.

If Google's 'user value' is any indicator, then at this rate Digg would be worth something around $3,896,103, assuming the user count is accurate, all users are located in North America and they don't apply some type of discount rate for not being able to make Digg a user's default home page.

Digg is hardly worth $300 Million. $11M Tops.

Digg, like reddit now, suffered from a bout of tyranny of the masses. Hard to come back from there.

I'm not convinced Digg has experienced any sort of downfall yet.