Revving Up Digg
What Digg is doing outside the media spotlight to gain traction and keep momentum. — BURLINGAME, Calif. — Jay Adelson, chief executive of Digg, is not easily flustered when cool technology hits the skids. Barreling south through San Francisco recently to reach an appointment …
Context & Ripple Effects
Forbes has followed Digg's leadership before — a 2006 video interview with Jay Adelson captured the company near its peak of hype, and Business Week's 2007 look at Digg going deeper into social networking marked its expansion phase. This July 2009 profile lands in a harder stretch: a January 2008 analyst had already argued Digg's golden days were over and its success story no longer sells.
The unglamorous details behind the headline are the real story. Digg's engineers still spend significant time keeping the site working in eight-year-old IE6, diverting resources from new features, and the April 2009 DiggBar rollout — which framed every submitted page — drew enough publisher outcry that by May Digg had to confine it to logged-in users. A December 2008 report that Digg hired Allen & Co. to explore a sale remains unconfirmed, but it hangs over any profile about regaining momentum.
First-order effects
- Adelson is managing two immediate drains on momentum: legacy-browser upkeep (IE6 support consuming design, development, and QA cycles that would otherwise ship features) and the publisher-relations cleanup after the DiggBar had to be pulled back to logged-in users within weeks of launch.
- The framing matters commercially — with an analyst already declaring the growth story unsellable in January 2008 and a rumored (unconfirmed) Allen & Co. engagement from December 2008, quiet operational progress is what Digg has to show prospective buyers or investors.
Second-order effects
- Publishers have demonstrated they will force product reversals — the DiggBar retreat showed that the sites supplying Digg's content can constrain how Digg wraps and monetizes referral traffic, raising the bar for any future tool that touches destination pages.
- Every engineering hour spent on IE6 compatibility is an hour not spent matching whatever rivals and social platforms are shipping, compounding the relevance problem the 2008 analyst flagged.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mid-sized Web 2.0 aggregators like Digg face a squeeze between legacy maintenance costs, publisher pushback over traffic control, and acquisition-or-decline pressure — the rumored sale exploration being one expression of it.
- The DiggBar episode points toward a structural rule: platforms that interpose themselves between publishers and audiences will meet coordinated resistance, pushing aggregation services toward opt-in, logged-in experiences rather than default interception.
The trend: User-driven news aggregators are shifting from growth-at-any-cost expansion toward defensive operations — managing legacy tech debt, placating publishers, and weighing exits — as their once-hot category matures.