Once a successful social network where people used to share bookmarks and information, Digg is heading to a serious downfall. As a recent study from Quantcast reveals, Digg’s US traffic dropped 50% this year in just six months. From 9.4 million visits in May, Digg only counted 4.6 million in October. The demographic states show that 39% of Digg users are young adults with the age between 18 and 34.
In June 2010, Digg founder Kevin Rose resigned from the CEO position after he reported being too frustrated with the lack of product innovation and the pressure of “keeping 90 people on the same page as to what’s going on in the company”. After his leaving, Digg struggled to regain its position on the market but without success. By the end of October last year, a third of the company employees found themselves out of a job.
Digg’s new feature “Newsroom” introduced in September this year, focused on the most important headlines was advertised as a service to “separate the news from the noise”. The strong filters as sourcing, signals, and curation are intended to deliver relevant headlines to the users, ranked by popularity and boosted by the influential Digg leaders of opinion. Recommendations should increase the level of interactivity and act as a better filter. However, this feature is no longer a powerful exclusive trait for a social network. The service did not deliver the expected results.
The direct competitor, Reddit, had a completely different development. While Digg’s star was setting down, Reddit showed off successful traffic reports. In October, Reddit offered 1.8 billion page views to 28 million unique visitors worldwide.
