When was digg.com started

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Digg Kills the DiggBar in April of , and unbanned domains it had previously prevented from participating. One month later in May , Digg announced a 10 percent layoff. A few short days later, Website Magazine publishes "Digg is Deadd" to great fanfare Digg Went back to work, released a new Digg in August of On March 18, , Rose resigned from his position at Digg.

He currently works at Google Ventures. In October , Digg slashed its staff by over one-third. Digg, not done yet, launches a site overhaul and redesign in February , following that with the release of Newsrooms in September In July , Digg was sold. According to various reports the Digg brand, website and technology were sold to Betaworks, while 15 staff members were transferred to the Washington Post's SocialCode project and a suite of patents were sold to LinkedIn.

Not already a part of our community? Sign up to participate in the discussion. There's too many stories, too many blog posts, too many status updates, too many tweets. Too much demanding your attention. In contrast, he said, "the theory of Digg is to build something that's very clean, very pristine.

It was pretty good, but it was a little bit behind. It added up to something that was boring. That's when we realized we needed an editor. Betaworks hired David Weiner, a journalist who was an early employee of the Huffington Post, as Digg's editor.

Today he manages a small team that — with a lot of help from software — decides what will appear on the site. Weiner knew he faced a big challenge salvaging Digg's tarnished brand.

By , Digg had suffered from years of bad press. In many peoples' minds, the sale of digg. We have a sense of humility. We can laugh at ourselves,'" Weiner said. For example, during the new Digg's first month, President Obama did an "ask me anything" post on Reddit.

Obviously, Digg couldn't compete with that kind of star power. So it responded with humor instead:. Users appreciated this self-deprecating approach. They also appreciated the eclectic fare Weiner and his team began surfacing at digg. Slowly, the site began to regain user trust, and traffic grew.

Alex Taylor is one Digg veteran who has warmed to the site's new incarnation. I like it the way that it is, but it's not the same.

Taylor attributes the success of the new Digg to a growing amount of content on independent blogging sites such as Medium. Digg helps to surface this content, which users might not otherwise see. Digg, she said, "appeals to me more because it's not quite so heavy-handed with mainstream media. According to McLaughlin, Digg has grown from 1. That's nowhere near as large as Reddit, which was once smaller than Digg but now serves million monthly visitors. But it's a surprising comeback for a site that had been abandoned two years ago.

McLaughlin said Digg has a realistic plan to reach profitability, though he wouldn't predict how soon the site would be in the black. He argued that there's lots of room for further growth.

He believes Digg's software tools and minimalist aesthetic will appeal to users in other countries, so international expansion is in the cards. There have been experiments with original content. And Digg hopes to "revitalize the Digg button," in McLaughlin's words, by making it a way for Digg users to signal to their friends that they like a particular article.

Last year, when Google announced it was shutting down its popular RSS reader, Digg saw an opportunity. Creating Digg Reader was made easier by the fact that the company already had software to scrape thousands of RSS feeds to help Digg's editors find good content. McLaughlin said Reader now has more than a million users. And they're very active, he said: "At any given time on a typical weekday, about 20 percent are in Digg Reader.

Digg's parent company, Betaworks, defies easy classification. Like a conventional startup incubator, Betaworks seeks to build companies that can eventually become independent brands. But it takes an unorthodox approach. In a traditional incubator, each startup is run by independent founders who work primarily for equity in their own companies. If a startup fails, its founder-employees are out of a job.

In contrast, the people running new Betaworks companies are salaried employees of Betaworks. They move from company to company as needed. If a Betaworks company fails, the designers, developers, and other talent behind the company are re-assigned to other projects. If a Betaworks company grows large enough to leave the nest, some employees go with the new company but others will return to the mothership to work on another project. McLaughlin describes Betaworks as a "startup studio," an analogy to the studios that dominated the movie industry during Hollywood's early years.

These studios had directors, writers, and actors under contract who would be moved from project to project as the need arose. Likewise, Betaworks has a stable of designers, developers, and project managers that can be tapped to help with new opportunities as they come along. This model seems to have helped Betaworks churn out a series of modest hits.

It owns Chartbeat and SocialFlow, which are tools popular with web-based publishers like Vox. Last year it acquired Instapaper , a popular app for saving content to read later. What the model hasn't done is produced a multibillion-dollar company like Google or Facebook. That's obviously not a trivial amount of money, but it's modest as Silicon Valley acquisitions go.

Instead of making a lot of long-shot bets in hopes of getting the occasional home run, Betaworks has figured out how to generate a consistent stream of singles and doubles: solid, profitable companies that aren't transforming whole industries but are helping millions of people and making a tidy profit in the process. This model is aided by the falling cost of computing resources. Digg needed to raise significant capital to cover the costs as the site grew.