Inside Digg's Race to Build the New Google Reader
Andrew McLaughlin is, like, California-enthusiastic. Like, we're-totally-going-to-do-this- guys enthusiastic. The 43 year-old CEO of the recently re-imagined Digg is a believer in the way the Internet can make the world better.
Context & Ripple Effects
Digg’s effort follows a period of reinvention: Betaworks took control in 2012, then pushed a redesigned Digg centered on editorial curation rather than the older community-driven model. The company had also spent years iterating on its core product, including the v4 release cycle.
The planned reader beta gives that relaunch a concrete adjacent audience. Digg’s April survey found that more than 40% of respondents would pay for a Google Reader replacement, making the product a potential revenue test as well as a bid for users displaced by Google Reader.
First-order effects
- Digg expands its product scope from curated social news to a feed-reading service, putting Andrew McLaughlin’s team in front of users seeking a Google Reader replacement.
- Google Reader users gain another beta option, while Digg gets an early signal of whether a paid reader can support its redesigned business.
Second-order effects
- Digg’s editorial-curation approach must coexist with the more user-controlled subscription model of a reader, making product design and retention central to the relaunch.
- A credible paid-reader signal from Digg raises the stakes for other replacement services competing for the same departing Google Reader audience.
Third-order effects
- If reader replacements can convert displaced users into paying customers, feed aggregation may shift from a bundled web utility toward smaller, standalone products differentiated by curation and interface.
- Digg’s move illustrates how a social-news brand can use an incumbent platform’s exit to rebuild relevance around a related daily-use product.
The trend: The shutdown-driven search for Google Reader alternatives is opening a market for independent feed readers that combine subscriptions with curated discovery.