Digg rose to immense prominence a couple of years ago by significantly changing the manner in which people could share news on the Web. Though its subsequent fall – and ultimately $500,000 sale to Betaworks – goes to underscore the even swifter evolution of technology, which is now helping tech-savvy people discover useful and updated content online.
The appeal of Digg was largely in the fact that it took away the monopolistic power of those traditional gatekeepers or news editors – to determine what stories were of priority and which were of less importance. Instead, the site relied on the dynamic community of connected users to vote news stories up or down on it. At its peak in somewhere around 2008, the website generated not less than 30 million unique visitors every month, according to a study by comScore.
Digg is now being unceremoniously folded into another site News.me, part of another wave of next generation of efficient news aggregators that incorporate numerous and vast social networking feeds. What has led to its demise is a combination of poorly received redesigns with alienating its core user base and the simultaneous rise of other popular services like Facebook and Twitter.
Rather than trying to find a story at the top of homepage of Digg, people could find them on basis of what their friends were presently reading and sharing. On Facebook and Twitter, stories remain at the top of respective users’ news feeds once their friends opt to re-share popular stories. However, Digg never worked on a technology to highlight the stories that were being shared by a user’s friends in an organized manner, according to analysts. This has cost it dear! Today, most people find stories primarily through Google search, but then social networks and other sites are catching up, too.
A New York-based tech start-up company, Parse.ly, analyzes online traffic data for publishers such as Mashable and Atlantic Media. According to it, over two days in the month of July, a little more than half of total traffic referrals were through Google; more than 14 percent of them took place through Facebook, whereas Yahoo accounted for about 6 percent, and Twitter for 4.23 percent. Another biggest traffic driver worth mentioning was Reddit (1.7 percent). Digg, on its part, accounted for mere 0.35 percent, ranking it a poor 17th after sites like Pinterest, Yahoo Ads and AOL.
Other immediate contemporaries of Digg’s, comprising content discovery engine StumbleUpon, have survived. Sold to eBay in 2007 for $75 million, that company is placed at the fifth position on the referral traffic list. News Corp acquired Newroo, another noteworthy news aggregation tool, in 2007. The goal was to infuse the technology into MySpace, according to Newroo co-founder Dan Gould. Development roadblocks though, prevented that from happening. Yet, for a company, which raised only $100,000, the exit was considered a reasonable success, he states.
There are companies such as iPad news aggregator Flipboard and News.me that analyze Facebook and Twitter feeds of users to decide what news stories are currently generating the most conversation and shares so as to recommend relevant ones. These apps stand for new era in the domain of news aggregation, observes the principal researcher at Microsoft Research, Kate Crawford. Also attached with the University of New South Wales as an associate professor (journalism and new media), she is conducting an elaborate study on aggregation algorithms like those of Google News and News.me.
She says it is not clear how exactly these newer apps decide which stories users should be reading. The changing news ecology via these personalization and recommendation apps, she concludes, quite a shift.
