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The Washington Post Subsidiary SocialCode Hires 15 Digg Employees

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:53:56 +0000

SocialCode is a social media advertising company and subsidiary of The Washington Post Co. SocialCode has announced that they have hired 15 employees from Digg.com. Digg was one of the most popular Silicon Valley companies where millions of people voted on the top news stories every day. They have declined in the last few years because of poor redesigns and constant unpopular changes. Many of their users flocked to Reddit or Twitter to distribute news to their friends.

Digg downsized their staff from 67 employees to 42 in 2010. In March 2011, Digg founder Kevin Rose left the company and now works for Google. Earlier this month, I wrote a post about how The Washington Post is rumored to be hiring the tech team at Digg and it turns out that was true.

It was rumored that the Digg tech team would be joining The Washington Post Company’s WaPo Labs, known for creating products like Trove and The Washington Post’s Social Reader app for Facebook. Instead the time will join the ad consulting firm, which helps companies find ways to promote their goods and services on Facebook and Twitter.

SocialCode launched in January 2011. They have not acquired the Digg.com domain, service, or technology. Former Digg VP of ad products Alan Lippman will become chief scientist at SocialCode. Former Digg software developer Will Larson will become SocialCode’s director of engineering.

“This agreement marks the first of many planned moves, fueling SocialCode’s commitment to innovation and delivering leading-edge solutions to our clients,” stated SocialCode chief executive Laura O’Shaughnessy.

“At Digg, we have been studying social media since its inception,” wrote Digg CEO Matt Williams. “From Digg Social Reader to Digg Ads, we established a new paradigm for content and advertising on the web.” He added that having engineers move to SocialCode “felt like a natural next step.”

The Washington Post Rumored To Be Hiring Tech Team At Digg

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:55:33 +0000

There has been a rumor that Digg is being acquired by The Washington Post. However it turns out that The Washington Post is poaching a lot of talent from Digg’s technology team. The morale at the company has been low ever since Digg founder Kevin Rose left the company to start Milk. Milk was acquired by Google and Rose is now employed at the search engine company. The Washington Post is planning to place the new hires alongside the people that built The Washington Post Social Reader Facebook application.

Digg will not shut down after the tech talent is hired. Digg’s management team will try to figure out how to take advantage of the brand and the traffic. Digg has been looking for a buyer for the last few months. Digg was rumored to be in acquisition talks with Digg a few years ago, but that deal fell through. Will someone buy Digg? Very likely. For a price that they could have gotten several years ago? Nope.

Facebook May Help Digg’s Traffic, But Overall Engagement Is Still Down

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 16:54:46 +0000

The pageviews for news aggregation website Digg.com is up 35% in January and they have seen their highest traffic numbers since October 2010. The main reason for the jump is because of the Digg Social Reader application, which pushes stories read by users to Facebook automatically. Essentially Facebook referral traffic was up 67% in January. This app is similar to the Washington Post Social Reader and the Yahoo! Social Bar.

“As compared to stories read on Digg (without Digg Social Reader turned on) — there are two main differences,” stated Digg software engineer Will Larson. “Entertainment stories were 14 percent of all stories read but less than 4 percent of those added to the Timeline. Likewise, political stories comprise less than two percent of those added to a user’s Timeline but close to 10 percent of what people read. The differences are significant enough to begin to predict a new type of reading behavior.”

“Can Facebook help Digg forge a full-fledged comeback?” wrote VentureBeat editor Jennifer Van Grove. I highly doubt it will. Digg hit its peak in 2008 when people were going crazy about the election. Digg 4.0 led to the company’s self-destruction in terms of keeping people engaged.

Throw in the sponsored stories and you will notice that the homepage is not controlled by the power of the community, but rather media companies with big budgets instead. I saw a sponsored story with 9 Diggs sitting on the homepage today. Nine!

What am I basing my engagement rate claims on? Just look at the average number of Digg votes per story on the homepage. Back in 2008, the average Digg story was hitting hundreds of Diggs. Today each average story has less than 100 Diggs.

Just to hit the Digg homepage if you weren’t “white-listed” would require 150+ Diggs and about 10 comments. If you look at the Digg homepage regularly, you will notice that the same 100 or so white-listed websites are home-paged over and over again. Digg’s homepage lacks diversity, which is why I still think that they are terrible.

Digg Received Roughly 17 Million Unique Visitors In October

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:21:54 +0000

Digg VP of Engineering Ben Folk-Williams has uploaded a screenshot of Digg’s traffic between May and October of this year. It appears that in the month of October, Digg.com received about 17 million unique visitors in traffic and this has been somewhat consistent since this past May. About 50% of the visitors were from the United States.

The company has seen a 23% increase in daily users since they launched a revised iOS app with Newsroom integration. About 51% of the traffic is direct, which means that people are typing Digg.com into a browser 13 million times per month.

[Digg Blog]

VP Product Management at Digg Keval Desai Stepping Down

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 06:22:33 +0000

Keval Desai, the VP Product Management at Digg, is stepping down. This is happening shortly after Digg founder Kevin Rose stepped down only to remain on the company’s board of directors. Desai joined Digg in January 2010 after leaving Google. Ben Folk-Williams will be replacing Desai.

Kevin Rose Resigned From Digg, Still Sitting On Board

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 02:42:44 +0000

Digg founder Kevin Rose has stepped down from the company recently. He has started a new company in stealth mode and is close to raising $1 million in funding. Rose launched Digg in December 2004 and it gained popularity very quickly.

In the middle of 2008, Google became very close to buying the service but backed out. Digg would have been acquired for close to $200 million, but the deal fell through. Former Digg CEO Jay Adelson got everybody back on track after the deal did not go through.

After Adelson stepped down, Rose took over as CEO until they hired Matt Williams this past fall. Rose will remain on the board of directors at Digg and it is still very active with Revision3.

[TechCrunch]

Kevin Rose Not Really Active On Digg Anymore

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:38:15 +0000

Digg launched a new version of their service in August. Ever since then, traffic has been plummeting. A lot of the Digg community moved on to Reddit. Digg has not been the same since 2008 when President Obama was being elected and traffic was surging. Even Digg founder Kevin Rose is not that active on the website any more.

In a report created by TechCrunch, there was even a point in December when Kevin Rose did not do anything on Digg for 22 days. Not one digg, not one comment, not one submission. And over the last 30 days, Rose had only done seven actions on Digg. That is less than one action every 4 days. He has not submitted a story since February 13.

However Rose still has time to tweet. He sent out about 181 tweets over the last month, which makes him 26 more times active on Twitter than Digg. Yikes. Ironically, Kevin Rose responded to the TechCrunch story in a tweet by saying “@arrington @techcrunch I think you forgot we shoot a weekly podcast about digg stories..”

[TechCrunch]

Digg Hires Ben Folk-Williams As VP of Engineering

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 23:42:27 +0000

Social bookmarking website Digg.com has hired Ben Folk-Williams as the VP of Engineering to replace John Quinn. Quinn left this past November to join online retail company Gilt Groupe. Before Digg, Folk-Williams was the VP of Engineering at online marketplace company Vast.com.

Yahoo! Attempted To Unload Delicious On Digg

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 07:52:04 +0000

On the Diggnation podcast, Digg founder Kevin Rose revealed that he had talks with Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) about taking over Delicious. This was before an internal memo leaked where Yahoo! said they are planning to sunset Delicious.

Initially Rose said he thought Yahoo! wanted to sell them off, but it turns out they wanted to give Delicious a new home in general. That is when they started talking about how much it would cost to keep Delicious online.

Rose wrote in a tweet after the slide leaked that he would be interested in buying Delicious and combining it with Digg to make one giant bookmarking website. One of the ideas he had in upgrading Delicious is by allowing users to take a snapshot of websites that they bookmarked. He also believed that audio recording and audio annotations would be a good addition to Delicious bookmarks. Rose had also contacted Delicious founder Joshua Schachter to find out if he would join him in working on a project to enhance Delicious. He does not know whether Yahoo! would hand Delicious to him or not.

Former Digg Engineering VP John Quinn Joining Gilt Groupe

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 09:12:54 +0000

John Quinn, the former Digg VP of Engineering is joining Gilt Groupe as the VP of Engineering this coming Monday. Quinn will be working at Gilt’s New York office and will be reporting to CIO Steve Jacobs. Quinn had worked at Digg for three years and had previously worked at Squaretrade as the VP of Engineering there too.

Rumor has it that Quinn was behind the newest version of Digg and was responsible for moving the social bookmarking website from MySQL to Cassandra. Digg’s newest design has not been favored much from users and a lot of people left ever since.

Gilt Groupe has about $83 million in funding and they recently launched a local deals service called Gilt City.

[TechCrunch]