Can Digg Find Its Way in the Crowd?

AMY VERNON still recalls the first time, two years ago, when a story she posted on the social news site Digg became popular. She had promoted a blog post titled “Why Does Tony Almeida Hate America?” that riffed on the villain from “24,” the Fox television series. She watched it jump to Digg’s front page, leading to so many hits on her blog that her server crashed.

“It was a really exciting thing,” says Ms. Vernon. “I got an adrenaline rush.”

That feat took her about six months and required her to vote in favor of 100 to 200 online stories a day. Eventually, she gave enough thumbs-up to entries of other avid Diggers that they began promoting hers. “It’s just something I did all day long,” says Ms. Vernon, who was then working as a journalist but is now a social media marketer.

Social Blade, a site that tracks social media, says Ms. Vernon is now the top female Digger, and ranks her No. 15 in an elite group that is informally known as the Power Diggers. The metrics of rising to the top on Digg are forbidding: before the site’s latest redesign in August, some 20,000 stories, on average, were submitted daily and fewer than 200 of those made it to Digg’s front page.

Digg pursued a redesign because Power Diggers had come to wield such an inordinate influence on the ranking of stories that new visitors to Digg usually found their submissions all but forgotten — sometimes making the site feel like a members-only club, rather than the communal product of unfettered crowdsourcing.

That insularity flies in the face of the open ethos of social media, and may help explain why Digg has ceded ground to other online heavyweights like Facebook and Twitter. It may also explain why Digg, a darling of the online media world just a couple of years ago, may have missed its moment.

“Personally, I think with the rise of all these other new sites, Digg is getting crowded out,” says Christopher Mascari, marketing manager at Gawker Media. “It seems that interest in Digg is waning.”

Digg, however, says it is still very much in the game and is trying to regain buzz by transforming itself into an alternative social network. The August redesign, called V4, is the first step. The default page for the new Digg is a “My News” link that shows what stories your friends are “Digging,” a feature intended to put less focus on the site’s “Top News” pages.

The site also now lets top publishers automatically Digg their RSS feeds, resulting in a fire hose of content streaming toward the site that gives Power Diggers less sway in story selection. Digg also did away with a “bury” feature that let so-called “bury brigades,” like the right-leaning Digg Patriots, keep stories that they disliked off the site. The site also temporarily eliminated individual rankings that cataloged users’ average number of daily Diggs and the percentage of stories they made popular, stripping power users of valuable measurement tools.

“It feels like a lot of these changes were designed to blunt the power of these power users,” says Matthew Ingram, a senior writer with the blog GigaOM.

Digg executives say the redesign, which has been plagued by technical glitches, is less about limiting power users than it is a response to consumers’ desire for customized content. Keval Desai, vice president for product management at Digg, says that people surveyed by the company loved the site’s wisdom-of-crowds ethos but that they also said, “I want to add something curated from my own crowd.”

Personalizing the site would also give Digg a chance to do more targeted advertising. “The new Digg will allow us to segment our audience and serve up more relevant content,” says Chas Edwards, publisher and the chief revenue officer.

But Digg, based in San Francisco, still struggles against the same force that has made MySpace an also-ran: Consumers don’t have an endless appetite for social networks, and only the most appealing and useful survive. All of which leads to a harrowing question for the company: Will people who are already on Facebook and Twitter become regular users of Digg as well, or have those sites already made Digg irrelevant?

WHEN Kevin Rose, a former host on the TechTV channel, created Digg in 2004 — before Facebook caught on and two years before Twitter’s start — the idea of a “social news” site, with content chosen by citizen-editors, was novel.

“There’s no handful of editors in a smoke-filled back room deciding which stories are important; the masses are deciding,” Mr. Rose told Business 2.0 magazine in 2006. He declined to be interviewed for this article.

For a time, Digg was the hottest Web 2.0 property around. In 2006, Mr. Rose was on the cover of BusinessWeek with the headline “How This Kid Made $60 million in 18 Months.” The article arrived at that lofty estimate of his stake in the company by quoting “people in the know” who said that Digg itself was worth $200 million at the time. That valuation was put to the test in 2008, when Google was said to have offered $200 million for Digg before walking away from the takeover in part because of different management styles, according to the blog TechCrunch.

Digg declined to discuss the Google talks for this article. A Google representative called the reports of a bid “rumor and speculation.” Two months after the TechCrunch report, an investment firm, Highland Capital Partners, plunked $28.7 million into Digg, giving the company a valuation of about $167 million.

(Over the years, Digg also got financing from Silicon Valley stalwarts like Greylock Partners, the Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.)

Yet those heady days back in 2008 may have been Digg’s high point. Since then, its growth and influence seem to have stalled, and the site is showing some age.

While Digg’s audience has grown handsomely worldwide — the company says it has about 30 million unique users a month globally, up from 8.5 million in 2006 — its more crucial domestic audience has shrunk.

According to Quantcast, an online audience measurement firm, Digg’s domestic traffic has dropped sharply in recent months, from 27.1 million unique users in April to 13.7 million in July. By contrast, Facebook had 145.2 million domestic users in June, according to comScore. While not giving specifics, Mr. Desai of Digg attributes the decline in domestic traffic to changes in Google’s search function that resulted in fewer Digg stories showing up in Google searches.

Yet a more pivotal reason that Digg is falling behind, analysts say, is that users are simply spending more time on Facebook and Twitter than they are on Digg. Instead of Digging, many social media users know that they can post a story they like on Twitter or Facebook.

Other rivals, like TweetMeme and Yahoo Buzz, have also successfully mimicked Digg’s social news functions.

Over the last year and a half, meanwhile, Digg has shuffled top management and laid off about 10 of its 100 workers. Jay Adelson, the C.E.O. of Digg since 2005, left in April and was replaced by the Amazon veteran Matt Williams in August. Mr. Rose, who is a director of Digg as well as its founder, has publicly said that he has no interest in the top job. As a private company, Digg doesn’t have to publish financial figures, so its profitability is hard to assess. But gaining new advertisers is an obvious necessity. Mr. Desai, who led the development of AdWords, Google’s successful search-based advertising platform, joined Digg in January and was the driving force behind V4.

The initiative is intended to group Digg’s users by interest and, the company hopes, generate new revenue. Bicycling enthusiasts, for example, will gather links in one area while fanatic sneaker collectors do so elsewhere. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work.

“If you’re interested in mountain biking or if you’re interested in social media advertising, we’re going to be recommending the people you want to follow, the best curators in those areas,” says Mr. Edwards, Digg’s chief revenue officer.

POWER users have greeted V4 with some loud protests, and Digg says it is listening to the feedback and tweaking the redesign. Mr. Edwards says V4’s intent is to create even more such users, not to mute their voices.

“We want power users to continue to be power users in their community,” he says. “We’re not trying to take anything away from existing influencers on Digg.”

But the V4 feature that lets major publishers Digg their stories via an RSS feed has taken the fun out of the game, says Andrew Sorcini, a film editor at Walt Disney, who is currently rated the No. 1 Digger on Social Blade under the moniker “MrBabyMan.”

“It eliminates any curation,” he says. “No one is really selecting which stories are better than others.”

To vent their anger, some power users are trying to hit Digg where it hurts. For instance, on Aug. 30, a group of Power Diggers relentlessly promoted links to Reddit, a rival site owned by Condé Nast Digital, on Digg’s own home page — resulting in a bump in traffic for Reddit.

“A lot of people who hadn’t heard of Reddit but tried us out a few years ago are giving us a second look,” says Erik Martin, community manager at Reddit. “We see a lot of comments on the site saying, ‘I am an ex-Digger and I don’t like what they’ve done.’ ”

But power users are just one of Digg’s problems today. In a world where Facebook’s traffic has proved worrisome even to digital titans like Google, finding a niche as an alternative social network is an increasingly quixotic task.

“My sense is that if people have even heard of Digg now, they know it’s no longer the hot new thing,” says Mr. Ingram, the GigaOM writer. “If it’s just a place to post funny links that people can share, there’s lots of places to do that now.”