The Rise and Fall and Rebirth of Digg

November 25, 2016 Amit Shaw

The internet has been responsible for and witnessed some spectacular rises and falls from grace, with companies like pets.com and webvan.com, sinking without a trace, the latter having been valued at $1.2 billion at its peak.

The normal course of events in these circumstances is about of finger-pointing, some unhappy investors, and everyone forgets about their very existence a short time later.

The social website Digg is an interesting scenario, as it has managed to experience a meteoric rise where it was attracting over 230 million visitors to its site every year, followed by a rapid subsequent fall in popularity.

But that was not the end of the story, and rather like Bobby Ewing in Dallas, stepping out of the shower (look it up if you were too young to witness that TV event), you might be forgiven for thinking that all that went on back in 2010 was just a dream, or a bad nightmare, as Digg set to work on rebuilding its empire from the ashes.

This infographic charts the rise and fall of Digg and it makes for interest reading.

When you look at the soaring popularity of the site and a number of users it managed to accumulate, it seemed highly implausible at one stage that Digg could do any wrong. But the 14 million stories and 500 million “Diggs” that it had generated at one point, seemed to count for very little when things started to go wrong.

There was even a point where Google was expected to acquire Digg for about $200 million back in 2008, but by 2012, Digg had dug a hole for itself that was too deep and the venture collapsed.

They did raise about close to $17 million for various components of the business and key team members were transferred. Fast-forward to January 2015 and the new Digg has managed to reach almost 12 million monthly users.

This is an interesting story played out via the infographic and tells a tale of rebirth that is rarely witnessed in the harsh unsentimental world of the internet and commerce in general.