Digg Overtakes Facebook with 1400% Growth, 22.6 Million Uniques

http://dcurt.is/digg-overtakes-facebook-with-1400-growth-226-million-uniques

by hodgesmr • 14 years ago

62 38 14 years ago

dcurt.is

marcamillion• 14 years ago

In the blink of an eye, in internet years.

VictorZ• 14 years ago

Go ahead. Rub it in.

sukuriant2• 14 years ago

Fascinating to see Digg coming back from the grave, so to speak. I didn't see this coming.

Er... Fascinating to see such an old article come up on Hackernews without the age of the article in parenthesis.

That's a derp.

fletchowns• 14 years ago

Ehhh...what?

christiangenco• 14 years ago

    Richard Macmanus, at ReadWriteWeb, on June 20th, 2007:

sukuriant2• 14 years ago

Or ... not!

nilved• 14 years ago

Which isn't mentioned in the title.

nmridul• 14 years ago

The article submitted to HN is new. But in it he quoted a 2007 article. The slogan of his blog speaks for itself ...

dredmorbius• 14 years ago

Sic transit gloria lacinia felis.

rdg• 14 years ago

Really? In which parallel universe?

dennisgorelik• 14 years ago

More recent data shows nosedive:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com/

rhizome3• 14 years ago

No no no...they "adjusted their conversion factors."

rhizome3• 14 years ago

woops, there were errors returned from the server at the time.

rhizome3• 14 years ago

Not a nosedive...they "adjusted their conversion factors."

carsongross• 14 years ago

It's a crazy world out there, kids:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1850428

Try not to let it bother you too much.

therealarmen• 14 years ago

It's a fun exercise, but we all know how reliable Compete is for quantitative traffic comparisons. For example, Compete currently claims Reddit (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com/) has less traffic than Digg (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com/).

I sincerely doubt Digg surpassed Facebook's traffic at any point in the company's lifetime.

jedberg• 14 years ago

Compete just makes numbers up. Those uniques are so far off for reddit it isn't even funny.

crash013• 14 years ago

Why did you let the reddit community turn to shit?

oconnor02• 14 years ago

That's a very strong claim. What evidence do you have for it?

raldi• 14 years ago

Google "experts misunderestimate"

vlad• 14 years ago

Very misleading quote. The full article features disbelief about Compete.com numbers, so it seems as much a critique of Compete.com as it does a story about Digg.

Since I ended up reading the article, I have to wonder if Compete counted Digg buttons on blogs as visits. Facebook, of course, did not even get a Share/Like button until 2.5 years later in late 2009 (http://mashable.com/2009/10/26/facebook-share-buttons/) It would be easy to get millions of daily uniques if popular newspapers all request your script or image in every article, and sites like Compete don't properly take social buttons into account.

(It's interesting that recent articles have debated if Facebook itself now counts the display or click of a Like button as a visit.)

jere• 14 years ago

Is anyone else hoping to read the same article in 5 years but about Facebook?

zalew• 14 years ago

that guy using diaspora (I've heard of him, he must exist somewhere)

josephcooney• 14 years ago

ck2• 14 years ago

Wasn't it the redesign that started the avalanche of people leaving?

Or am I mistaken? Maybe if they had just left it alone and did gradual tweaks instead...

notatoad2• 14 years ago

No maybe about it. Digg lost their market by messing with their product. It's an interesting case, because you can make a direct comparison with reddit: two nearly identical products serving the same market started at the same time. Digg tried to grow too fast and failed, reddit grew at its natural pace and succeeded.

dmix• 14 years ago

I don't know... I was part of a big migration to reddit around 2008-2009.

I remember there being tons of threads on Reddit of ex-diggers making fun of Digg around then. There were frequent posts daily about the complete degradation of quality on Digg back then.

The running joke was all the posts on Digg's current frontpage were from Reddits frontpage yesterday.

The redesign (in 2010) was the nail in the coffin.

earino• 14 years ago

As I see it the basic problem was one of name. Who wants to be a digger? It sounds fancy pants to be a redditor.

mkramlich• 14 years ago

This re-emphasizes one of my own personal rules of entrepreneurship: when someone offers you a FU money exit, and you don't already have FU money, you take it. You take it and walk. Because if you don't, you might regret it, and who knows what the future will bring. After you reach FU money, it's not like you can't go and try building another new product/service/website/gadget again -- you can, except you'll be starting from a much safer and happier place, with more resources, connections, eyeballs, etc.

unreal37• 14 years ago

I think Kevin Rose is doing OK. He has FU money.

dangerboysteve• 14 years ago

What a total BS blog post with no real data

Digg Overtakes Facebook with 1400% Growth, 22.6 Million Uniques

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